


there was one dawn

by rhymae



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Fix-It of Sorts, Gay Richie Tozier, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris Are Best Friends, having to evaluate how much of your hometown's cruelty lives inside you, in another universe richie & patty are bffs who annoy their PTA husbands. this is not, that universe im so sorry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:33:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28424781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhymae/pseuds/rhymae
Summary: There is no other way to tell this story. You imagine spinning the truth of it to a room full of strangers, balancing the wrong side of laughter.You say, “People love an underdog. I get money, they get less sad—everyone wins.”“Do they?” Eddie asks, tone lower now that the shuffling has ended. “Does everyone really win?”The joke’s suspended on your tongue: a man walks into a bar. A man picks up a microphone. A man says,I’ve never known how to get out of anything I made myself because I’ve never made anything myself! Isn’t that fucked?“So I’m told,” you say, straightening your back to lean further on the railing. “Haven’t really seen the results myself, Eds.”.Or, Richie and Eddie, in reverse & flash-forward.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 13
Kudos: 12





	there was one dawn

**Author's Note:**

> I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.
> 
> But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'
> 
> All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”  
> 
> 
> \- Maggie Nelson, Bluets

A man walks into a bar, picks up a stray microphone, and taps it.   
  


He says, _hello hello! testing testing testing— is this thing on? Is this my line? Damn, is this that direct pathway shit I hear about with God? Can you hear me? Am I talking to God right now? Is this an interception? I really can’t get away from this shit, huh.  
_  
  
The bar has an audience but it also has lights, bright things that hide the people waiting just below the drop.   
  


The audience laughs and the microphone rings. The man smiles. The man laughs.  
  
  
The man looks out into the audience, taps the microphone again. The audience waits for the joke, and the man waits for the audience waiting and says— _holy shit, are you my God? After all of this nothing, is this my something? Is this the white light? Is this all there really is? Didn’t I try hard enough? Is this what I get? People laughing at me? Have you even heard a real joke yet that isn’t just me?  
_ _  
_ _  
_ The lights move. The audience laughs.  
  
  
The man asks, _does this make you my God?_   
  


And the audience laughs. Doesn’t wait. Doesn’t notice the man waiting, the microphone still ringing loud enough to keep the joke running, slipping the man right underneath. 

  
  


  
.  
  
  


  
  


Here is where it starts: 

  
  
  


He pushes you out of the deadlights.

And everything that comes after makes you wish you’d never remembered any of it. 

Rewind. Here is another place it starts: 

You are six, and Stanley Uris is your best friend because he’s funny without meaning to be and he doesn’t always laugh at your jokes. You like this about him.

You are six, it’s raining during the last half of recess, and there is a kid across the playground, hiding underneath the slide and snarling at the sky like he’s trying to outlast the water.

Stan is staring at him in a way that means he finds something so confusing it's funny. And you can’t help yourself. 

Maybe it’s Stan who moves first, or maybe it’s you, or maybe the kid meets your eyes without really meeting them and that’s all it takes, but either way you are both walking over to the kid who’s screaming at the clouds like they can hear him.

You say, “What the hell are you screaming at?” 

Because you like the reactions adults give you when you use their words, and you think this kid might give you the same.

But the kid doesn’t flinch. Instead, he narrows his eyes like he’s thinking about screaming at you instead.

The kid says, in the same tone your teacher uses when you get an answer wrong, “I’m trying not to get sick. What does it look like, stupid? Are you an idiot?”

There’s a pause, a moment of absolute stillness, before Stan bursts out laughing behind you. 

All you can do is stand there and stare wide-eyed at this kid, who is so much smaller than you but dressed just like your father down to his socks, hiding only half of his body underneath the slide.

Then you’re saying, “Oh, then this is really going to suck for you.”

The kid says, “What are you—” before you’re licking a long stripe over your hand and pressing it straight to his cheek.

The kid’s scream gets the teacher’s attention, who then gives you timeout. Stan sneaks you a strawberry lollipop, and at the end of the day you’re running up behind the same small, screaming kid and offering it to him as a present. 

Not an apology, though, because an apology means you won’t do it again.

But he takes it, says his name is Eddie. 

He just turned six and he likes playing cars, and he makes you laugh even more than Stan does, which is new and you like it a lot. You like how he rolls his eyes and how he says you can play together tomorrow. How he’ll even bring his friend Bill too.

Twenty years down the line and you never have a good explanation for why strawberry candy is your first pick flavor, even though you don’t really like it all that much.

Here is another starting place:

You are watching his face closely for the first time in twenty-seven years. Since you thought you killed the clown the first time.

Here is the tragedy of his smile. Of hearing him say, “Rich! Richie, wake up. There you go! Rich, man, I think I killed _It_!”

Here is the frozen image of his body being torn away from yours. Of his body in pieces. Alone.

Here is the image on loop. In your memory. On a slideshow in different levels of sepia. Here is the unmade funeral. The unmourned sweetness of childhood you didn’t know you missed until you got it back.

Here is the end:

You hold your best friend in your arms, listen to him crack a joke that would get you booed off stage, and when you come back he’s dead.

You crush the clown’s heart. You tear off its legs. Nothing seems broken enough.

So you are in the quarry. Your friends are hugging you. You are crying. You can’t stop crying. 

Someone makes a joke, and you don’t think you’ll ever laugh again with this much weight pressing on your chest. You think It may as well have just killed you when that claw came down, for all the life you’re going to leave in its wake. 

You look at Bill, who lived through this as a kid. At Bev who saw it all happen twenty years ago. 

You ask, “How did you do it?”

And no one gives you an answer you like. 

Here’s the interlude. The joke, suspended:

The equation of comedy itself is tragedy plus time.

But there’s a trick. Because if you have a surplus of one, the equation is off and the mix doesn’t set. 

Too much tragedy and not enough time makes the punch drag. Too much time and not enough tragedy burns out the fuse.

So, then, what’s the punchline? Because you were promised a laugh here, weren’t you? Where does the joke end up when its formula for construction has already dissolved at the root?

The answer to the question is the same as what rushes back after a phone call twenty-seven years too late, calling its listener back home—

A man walks into a bar. A man picks up a microphone. A man says, _I’ve never known how to get out of anything I made myself because I’ve never made anything myself! Isn’t that fucked?_

This is the part where the audience laughs. Where they cheer. Where the equation lands. 

The man says, _A man walks into a bar, picks up his phone, walks into a sewer with his childhood best friends, and this— are you ready for this one? This is the part where everything changes._

Here is the start of the rest of it:

Your friends are still holding you in the quarry. You are still crying. 

You go to the Townhouse. You drink anything you can find on the shelf, lock the door and drink until you forget your name, until you puke all over the carpet and your shirt. 

There’s knocking until there isn’t, but you don’t know if that means anyone actually stopped knocking. You pass out on the floor, and you

—fall back into rocks, hiss when you feel them cutting through your jacket. Feel the splatters of blood on your back before you have to see them. 

Everything must be on fire, it's suddenly so bright. 

Then there’s Eddie’s voice, rising from the shadows. 

And you don’t care if it's one of the clown’s tricks, the clown you thought you killed, who killed your best friend, saying: _Rich, Richie, Rich! Did you see? Rich, come on, dude. Look, I think I_ —

He pushes you out of the deadlights, your back is bleeding against the rocks and— 

wait. You know this one. Strawberry lollipops and screaming. Stan _laughing,_ but Stan isn’t here.

You blink and there’s the image, frozen. 

He pushes you out of the deadlights. Bev says, _I don’t think I did, honey._ Bill says, _It takes a part of you awa_ y. He pushes _you_ out of the _dead—_

and you’ve never moved quicker in your life. 

  
  


.

  
  


The clown shows you a lot of shit, but maybe the worst part about it is that it’s nothing you didn’t already know.  
  
Stan has the painting and Eddie has the leper and Bill had his dead baby brother come back to life to haunt him, but you didn’t have anything new, anything extra to sprinkle on top.  
  
Your haunting wasn’t anything you didn’t already have inside of you. 

Bev had her fucked up dad, Mike had the fire that took his family, and Ben had his own self thrown back into the mirror, but that’s the closest any of you came to understanding your own monsters in the closet.

  
Which comes back, of course, to the first rule you know. One that the clown didn’t have to teach you because you already learned it yourself on school yard gravel, blood in your teeth at eleven, at thirteen.  
  
Because in Derry, in the world, wherever you imagine yourself, the rule is this: boys who like boys wind up dead. 

You can mix and match the equation, but you’ll still get the same result. The same _dirty little secret_ dripping down and red across the clown’s mouth.

So, boys who like boys are dead. Or, Derry is where boys who like boys don’t stay. _Or_ , Derry is where you are, and boys who like boys are still dead inside and outside of it.  
  
Either way, this is the rule so, _by logic_ as Stan would say, that means you must be its break. 

Because, somehow, you aren't dead yet. Even if sometimes you kind of wish you were, pushing the pain of summer behind you and watching your friends move on without you in their plans.

Miraculous. Comical. Fucking ironic.

  
  
It’s fucked up. You know this. 

The clown knew this, holding out your life in front of you and having it reflected back like a funhouse mirror, titled in a missing poster, an unmourned funeral pamphlet where no one attended the same way no one noticed you even went missing— unusual and the opposite of what you’ve been taught to see.  
  
So, boys who like boys in Derry are dead. The clown hinted at it, yeah, but that fucker doesn’t get the credit.  
  
Bowers is the one who taught you. Right next to the hours you spent in the school bathroom, trying to scrape out _Richie Tozier sucks flaming cock_ from the stalls before any of your friends had a chance to see. 

Beating in your teeth is only half the fun without the slurs, you guess, what with the way Bowers is so favorable to them. The same gets shot at Stan, at Bill, at _Eddie_ when you aren’t there to stop it— but Bowers saw you flinch in the arcade, _Street Fighter_ game lights and silver tokens pouring out your hands, and you’re his favorite target. 

_Were_ , of course now, before the clown. Before Bowers did whatever the fuck he did to his dad. What he almost did to Ben, to Eddie and Bill and Stan and _you_.

Now Derry’s bullies are nameless, but they’re still everywhere, and it’s almost scarier that way, not knowing the name to the face beating the shit out of you in the dark.  
  
Here’s the equation again, a shake-up if you will, because everyone knows how much you like those: 

One boy who likes boys + how badly Derry wants to peel him out = living through the sewers just to end up buried in the ground somewhere else, without friends and without a secret.

It’s so fun. Oh, you _love_ how fun it is. Funhouse mirror perceptions and how it should all be a joke, but somehow it still isn’t.

But not every piece of you is something dirty, you’ve learned. Not always something dangerous that needs to be scratched out on school lockers. 

Because you are also pieces of your friends, who could never be dirty, even if they’re more than just dangerous.

You love the clubhouse and your friends and you love the way you hugged Bev before she left at the end of that summer. 

How she smelt like the cigarettes you both would smoke behind the gym and the way she smiled with all her teeth and said, “Live for the legends, Trashmouth. This shithole doesn’t stand a chance without us.” 

Like she could read you’re fucking thoughts, sometimes, and how that never scared you as much as when she couldn’t.

How you’d grinned right back and neither of you mentioned the way your own eyes watered, saying, “We are the fucking legends, Ringwald. Don’t forget to write if you kill anymore murder clowns.”

And the way she laughed, light and heavy at once, because that was the sound you wanted to remember her by most.

  
  


.

  
  


You break the rules.

Because you can make allowances after watching your best friend die in front of you repeatedly, and because you have never been good at keeping them anyway. 

Because, somehow, you are still alive.

Neibolt sinks into the ground and there are six of you watching it, breathing and alive and walking. Six isn’t a circle, but it’s so much better than five and so much less than seven. 

You watch Bill watching and you know he’s thinking about the body of his little brother he never got to bring back into the light. You think of how he was ready to let the same thing happen to Eddie, and then you have to stop.

You think of the quarry. Of your friends laughing hours after the boy you loved died in your arms, and how you had to leave him where he hated most, alone and in the dark.

Bev opens her mouth, but you’ve seen this part and you’ve earned it, so you say: “Anyone up for a swim?”

And Ben was right, of course, because Eddie does hate it. The same way he hates everything and doesn’t try to hide any of it. You of all people can’t start anything about hiding though.

Eddie’s listing off facts that would make _WebMD_ doctors proud, and you’re still touching him like you’re afraid one wrong move will send him up into smoke. 

Ben and Bev share a moment you turn away from, and you’re still touching him. You haven’t stopped since you pulled him away from the claw, just started shifting to keep it less obvious. 

But whether he doesn’t notice, doesn’t care, or is just happy to be alive, Eddie doesn’t say a thing about your calf against his thigh on the rocks, your hand on his shoulder, your fingers on his wrist when you finally pull him into the water, kicking and screaming explicit words that would have made even Stanley “Trashmouth Veteran” Uris raise an eyebrow.

You’re laughing so hard at Eddie’s _you motherfucking dick, richie! You asswipe, I swear—_ it’s Mike’s gentle, “Rich, you okay?” that alerts you it’s turned into sobbing anyway. Fucking hell.

This time, when the Losers surround you, you can feel Eddie, warm and alive and breathing against your back, and all you can think is the alternate pathways the deadlights left you with.

Six inches to the right. Ten minutes less in the bathtub.

You don’t know what to do with all of it.

  
  


.

  
  
  


Okay so, here are some other things you know. 

Well, minus the clown and Bowers and the way Stan has been looking at you closer in the past two weeks after Eddie broke his arm like he’s _seeing_ you, and you don’t know how to handle that. How you still can’t walk through the green in front of Paul Buneon _even—_

So, things to know. Yours. Here they are:

  
  
1.) Despite the clown’s best efforts, not all of you is unsalvageable.

Because you still have your friends, and they are a part of you the same way you are a part of them.

That’s important. That’s a fucking revelation the clown tried to smother out of you, but it’s laughable, because you could never think of the Losers like that. Like what _you_ are.

Bev will never be any of the awful things the people in Derry call her and Eddie is not weak, no matter how much his mom tries to make him think it. The rumors about them aren’t true like the ones about you are. 

Turns out the clown did know some jokes after all, even if they were indirect.

So, to recap: the Losers will never be a secret and they’ll never be dirty, though you still aren’t sure what love means outside of your friends. Which leads you into number two:

  
2.) Not all of your love is bad. Even if you don’t really under the extent of it.

You find this in the way Mike and Eddie race you to the clubhouse. The way Bill laughs when you all stumble in, eye bruised blue still from where some fucker had hit him. Because even though Bowers is gone, it doesn’t mean anything else has changed. 

You find it in the way Stan tries not to laugh when you _do_ say something funny and the way Ben lets you put your head in his lap in the clubhouse after school.

How Bev used to roll her eyes in the corner but still smile and share her cigarettes with you whenever you ask. Which rolls into number three:

  
  
3.) You are all stronger together.  
  
Better, even. As in, you make each other into better people, into people who care and aren’t afraid to show it.  
  
It’s fact, no trace of fiction. And you love it. 

If there was a fourth rule in the universe, it would be _Richie Tozier loves his friends_. 

And in that same, perfect world where you get a fourth rule, where you get what you want, you wouldn’t have to hide it or scratch it out over any sprayer slurs in the school bathroom beside your name. 

  
This isn’t all you know, of course, but it’s the foundation. The person the summer of ‘89 has pushed you into and the shadows the seven of you adopted to hop right back out.  
  
Because now, you all know these things. 

You know that being together means being stronger, means being better. And you’ve never wanted anything more than to keep it all pieced together.

  
  


.

  
  


The Townhouse is still standing.

You don’t know why that surprises you. Maybe you’d just assumed anything in Derry that hurt you was tied back to the clown. 

But that’s not exactly true, is it? Thirty years of repression doesn’t die in a flash of blinding light and a collapsed house.

Eddie herded you all to the hospital after you finally stopped crying in the quarry, and no one on the nursing staff made a comment about the sniffling six foot man when five other people covered in blood and sewage walked into the ER like it was nothing.

And now, you think, hands and back bandaged from the cuts and scrapes you’d gotten in the sewer, _maybe it was nothing_. 

After killing the monster of your childhood, what else could compare? 

Eddie is alive. Bev and Ben are breathing; Mike is bruised up, and Bill is sitting at the townhouse’s bar beside you, freshly showered and still quiet.

You’d all escaped the hospital with a few injuries but nothing dire enough to warrant a prolonged hospital stay. 

So you’re back in the Townhouse. Ben’s head in Bev’s lap as you all gather around the living room in a circle with any alcohol you can find making its way to the middle.

The deadlight dream flashes behind your eyes when you pick up a glass. The smell of your own vomit and how the knocks on your door were getting closer as you passed out. 

Bev’s the one to break the silence. 

She says, quiet from her spot on the couch and looking out the window. “I almost can’t believe it’s over.”

Ben reaches out to squeeze her hand, and Mike nods, looking dazed.

“It’s been so long,” Mike says softly, and all of you think about how much longer it's been for him, aching with it. “Sometimes, I thought it would never end. But we did it. It’s over.”

“We won,” Bill says, scooting closer to Mike and offering him a beer, small smile growing when Mike takes it while shaking his head. “It’s all thanks to you, Mike. We won. It’s really over.”

“Holy shit,” Eddie mumbles beside you. 

He’s got a new pad of gauze taped to his cheek and the hint of his own smile, but there are still dark circles beneath his eyes from before the clown. 

There’s still a bag of little orange prescription bottles, too, filling his luggage that you caught when he used your shower.

Because that’s another trick: you all know you didn’t kill your real fears when you killed the clown.

You killed the thing that weaponized them against you, who struck you over and over like a brand, trying to take you with it. But that doesn’t mean they’re gone. 

You killed a murderer, but you didn’t kill the source of its prey.

Bev, as if she can read your mind, says, “It’s weird to have a name for it. I used to be so afraid of everything. Even after I left, I still had all this fear and no idea what to do with it.” 

She huffs out a breath, frustrated, “It’s like, even though the clown took on parts of my dad, my dad was still _real_ . What It preyed on was still _real_ , underneath it all. I think that’s what made it so hard to let go of.” 

Pennywise’s smile and _Oh, do you like looking at other boys, Richie? Don’t you want a kiss?_

“Even if the source of It’s game were real, I don’t have to be afraid anymore,” Bev says, chin tilted up and eyes daring any of you to disagree, as if you ever would. “None of us have to be afraid because now— now we know we can face them, and we aren’t alone anymore.”

_Do you like looking at other boys, Richie?— You didn’t tell me your town was full of little fucking faries— You can’t touch other boys, Richie— fucking Tozier are you trying to bone my little cousin?_ — _Get the fuck out of here, you f—_

“We’re s-stronger together,” Bill agrees, his voice muffled in your ears like you’re under water. “And I don’t k-know about you g-guys, but I’m really f-fucking sick of being afraid.”

_Afraid,_ god. You’re so tired of being afraid.

You can’t remember a time where you haven’t worn fear like a jacket, just waiting for the plunge. For the rug to be pulled out from under you when people realize what _you_ are, the monsters not quite in the dark. 

The werewolf. The arcade.

Because Bev’s right: the real things are just waiting in the shadows, masked behind all the clown makeup and murder.

Fuck it.

“Okay, cool,” you cut in, clapping your hands together, trying to come down from a voice that sounds too quick, too light for everything suspended in the room. For the way five pairs of eyes turn to look at you. 

“Does that mean it's my turn to overshare my clown related trauma then? Sweet.”  
  
  
“Dude,” Eddie hisses next to you, but you ignore it. Let the sound in the room take over until you’re hyper aware of every movement, every leg shift.

It makes you sad. It makes you want to be brave. Out of spite. Out of what you’ve been missing all these years, maybe, and how you still want it, even if maybe you haven’t begun to start earning it. 

You’d told Eddie _you’re braver than you think,_ because it was true. 

And you’ve always wanted to be half as brave as the kid who threw out his mom’s medicine in front of her, who took out a monster to save your life. Who almost died on top of you, just six inches to the right. 

_Fuck_ , don’t think about it. Instead, you do what you always do. You open your mouth. 

“Awesome, so I’ll start, and then we’ll hand it off to Eddie. Maybe get some good Derry stories out of Mike. You know, like one of those little ‘sharing’ games they’d make you play if you were a loud fucking kid? Shit, I should have brought my sharing stick _—”_

_—better not let other boys see, Richie. It’ll be our dirty little secret—_

“I’m gay,” you say, eyes closed and shouting maybe, with the way the words rush out of you too fast and how you hear Ben’s head jump in Bev’s lap. 

“Super homosexual. Pride parade membership and all. The only other one to know was the fucking clown. No originality, really. Where was he even getting his shit, Bowers? Reddit? I’d like some new material. C’mon, hit me up, Losers. Don’t be shy.”

You shrug, cough to clear your throat, still not looking up, eyes open now but on the floor. “Just wanted to get that one out there. With what you were saying about fear still being, well, real.”

A pause. A beat just long enough to have you calculating all the exits nearby and cursing yourself when you only count two.

“Richie,” says a voice, _Bev_ , you think. She sounds like she’s crying. 

You snap your eyes up to meet hers, and they look so fucking sad. Angry, even. 

“Richie, we love you, you know that, right? We're really fucking proud of you. Thanks for trusting us.” 

Everyone else joins in. You do not look at Eddie.

“Oh,” and now you’re fumbling at your first ever coming-out. Great. “Uh, thanks. You guys are kind of the first people I’ve ever told, but fuck that clown, right? So I thought I’d just get that out the way now.”

“So, wait,” Ben asks, and you start thinking about if you could make it far enough not to retch in Eddie’s lap. “Does that mean you were banging our dads instead?”

Your laugh startles out of you. No one says a thing when it cracks down the middle, or how you reach up to pinch at your eyes beneath your glasses, shaking your head.

“Fuck, I can’t believe you made that joke first. You guys can’t be funnier than me. I’ll have to end the friendship again.”

Bill snorts. “Good-luck with that. You c-can’t get rid of us now.” 

Eddie places a hesitant hand on your shoulder. When you risk a glance, he’s grinning, something in his eyes you can’t place. “Guess that makes me the only motherfucker here then.”

A bloody hand pressing against a bloodied body _—Rich_ , _I fucked your mom._

Jesus fucking Christ.

You’re opening your mouth before you’re even conscious of it: “Like I said, I’d love to share the spotlight here. Eddie baby, do you have a revelation for us? Something clown related and super fucking traumatic to share with the group?” 

For a moment, you swear something akin to panic washes over his face. But you blink and it's blank again, if a little unimpressed.

“Fuck no, dude. I got soaked in leper puke and almost stabbed through the fucking chest. I think I’m good.” 

Fair point.

“Fair. Mikey, got something to hit us with? Any Derry gossip in the last twenty-seven or so years? Something to spice it up?”

“Well,” Mike says, head tilted to the side. “This one is a bit...strange. We did have a kid in 2010 who dressed up like a clown for some reason? Like, full clown apparel. Everyday. Just going to school like it was normal. It scared the shit out of me. I almost called you guys back like three times for a kid who wanted to get into cosplay. Like, what was that?”

For a moment, there’s absolute stillness. 

You know you’re all imagining being called back to Derry six years earlier, memories intact, just to beat the fuck out of some unsuspecting fourteen year old who wanted to play dress up.

When the six of you laugh, the house shakes with it.

  
  


.

  
  
  


Two summers outside of the clown now and your list is getting harder to hold onto. 

You’re all high schoolers now, and you hate it. Memories have started to get blurry around the edges when you try too hard to think about them. 

Bev never called and none of you talked about it, afraid that mentioning her name would be enough to let her slip away too.

You wonder what high school is like for her. You hope she has friends, even if they aren’t any of you.

Instead, the rest of you are in the clubhouse. Bill is talking about his latest conquest, and you’re trying to hide how sweaty your hands have gotten in the hammock.

Eddie doesn’t share it with you as often anymore. Hasn’t since high school started and with it the relentless rumors again. You don’t blame him, of course. It makes sense. It keeps him safe. 

It still hurts.

Bill is saying something about hitting second base with Allison from Chemistry, so you try to tune in, lowering your comic enough to watch him over the edge.

Ben mentions getting a date for homecoming, and you want to puke. You want to bury it all down and revert back to middle school, climbing in through Eddie’s bedroom window and reading comics under the blanket with flashlights.

Mike is the one to ask about Allison, and Bill smirks a little, says, “A g-gentleman doesn’t brag, but I’ve d-definitely gotten under her bra.” 

And you know it’s your turn to make a joke, that they’re waiting for you to fill the silence because that’s what you do. It’s spelled out right in front of you, low-hanging fruit for _Trashmouth_ Tozier, but you bury your head back in the comic instead and let the moment pass.

So of course something worse happens.

Mike turns from nodding at Bill and smiles at Eddie instead. “What about you, Eddie? You planning anything special for homecoming?”

Eddie picks at his shoes and shrugs, says, “I don’t know. Lucy Williams from fourth period was asking me about it the other day, so we might go together.”

Ice crawls across your stomach. 

You’ve never had great control over your facial expressions, you know this. Voices you can work on, but the rest of you has always been an open book. 

And in that moment, you don’t know what you look like. Eddie’s still looking away and Mike and Bill have moved on. But you see Stan watching you across the clubhouse with a hard focus and all you can think is _obvious_ and _oh, do you like looking at other boys, Richie?_ _C’mon, give me a kiss then._

A hand brushing yours over a game of _Street Fighter_ and Bowers screaming about how he’s going to beat the shit out of you in the arcade until you’re running. Because you’re good at that, at running away.

So it’s what you do now, when Mike, sweet and polite and kind Mike, who just wants to involve you with your friends, turns to you.

Mike says, “What are you doing for homecoming, Rich?”

Stan’s knowing look and Bowers’ screams are creating a symphony of something in your head, and you push it down. 

Roll it over four times and burn the thought, the frozen hot feeling peeling at your stomach when you think of Eddie dressed up for a prom date with someone who doesn’t really care about him the right way. For someone who isn’t _you_.

You laugh, and it’s unsteady at best, cracking down the middle, “Definitely not fucking going, that’s for sure. I don’t wanna be locked down for the rest of the year just to risk getting my dick wet like the rest of you virgins. I don’t need a school dance for that shit.”

“Jesus, Richie,” Bill says, rolling his eyes. “Tell us how you r-really feel.”

You shrug, gesture at yourself and raise an eyebrow, still not glancing in Eddie’s direction, “Sorry, the only woman to lock all this down is our very own Mrs. K, but I already lock her down every night anyway, _so—_ ”

“Shut the fuck up, dickhole,” Eddie snarls from the corner. You risk a quick glance at him, surprised to find genuine anger on his face. 

You raise your hands up in a motion of stunned surrender, the comic falling into your lap, “Woah, Eds, chill out. You know I can’t control the passion between me and good ol’ Mrs. K.”

“Do you take anything seriously?” Eddie says, sounding almost furious in a way that shocks you. “Is there anything that isn’t a fucking joke to you? You’re such a fucking liar. I’ve never even seen you with a girl!”

Stan says, sharp, “Eddie.” 

The way he does when a silent rule has been broken. And then you realize no one’s looking at you anymore.

Red flashing lights. _Warningwarningwarning_ blinking at you, freezing you in place.

There’s so much in the question, so many unsaid things filling the air between the two of you that you risk choking on it. You could say something stupid, something jagged enough to stun a laugh. You could go with your usual lie, say, _c’mon Eds_ , _I told you! Becky living in Bangor let me bang, remember? That party I told you about?_ But it’s so much easier to slip into habit, for even a second, than to face this.

Because that’s another rule, playing right out in front of you: it’s easier to play the part than risk the truth. Richie Tozier’s just a big fucking coward.

“Fuck you, dude,” you say, jumping to your feet, ignoring Ben’s concerned look, the way Stan’s glare hasn’t left Eddie, even as he shrinks back down from his own rant. 

“I don’t need this bullshit anyway,” you say, nearly slipping on the comic before grabbing onto the ladder and pulling yourself out, not looking back. 

“Good luck getting her to put out, Eddie-bear. If mommy lets you go at all.”

No one follows you. You walk through the woods, until you're far enough away from any possibility of footsteps. Then you’re running until your lungs burn half as bad as your eyes have started to.

You don’t go back to the clubhouse for a week, but none of the Losers comment on it.

Stan comes over the next day with a new set of comic books and a comfortable quiet that neither of you try to fill.

It’s three days later that Eddie talks to you again, slipping in through your window with the Walkman he borrowed from you offered up like a peace offering, picking up as if nothing had even happened.

Neither of you end up going to Homecoming. 

  
  


.

  
  


LA is both just the same and completely different when you come back.

The six of you eventually had to split up again. You all knew it, but that didn’t make it any easier. 

You all have a group chat now. Bill was the first one with a flight, taking Mike right back with him to kick off his tour of America, saying something about how Audra would love him too. _Obviously_ , you all thought.

The trip had your teeth on edge until Bill started sending hourly texts of, _I still remember you_ _guys_.  
  
He and Mike kept sending them from when they first left the town limit to when they landed. Now, the texts are a bit more spaced out, though just as meaningful.

After that, the pieces started falling into place a little quicker. Bev and Ben got a flight the next evening to Ben’s house in Nebraska while Bev called her friend Kay about delivering divorce papers.

“You know I’d do anything for you, Ringwald,” you’d whispered in her ear, hugging her tight as Eddie and Ben said goodbye a few feet away. 

“Just say the word and I’ll put him straight in the ground. No questions or conditions. I’ve killed a man before, no sweat. I can do it again.”

Bowers death probably should have fucked you up more than it did, you know this. 

You feel more sick over the dark feeling of satisfaction that he’s dead instead of the fact you were the one to kill him. It should mean more to kill a human being, but you think Bowers was long dead by the time you even got to him.

You’re no shrink, but even you know that’s probably a problem.

Bev just squeezed you around your middle, tight enough that you could feel her soft smile against your throat. “Appreciated, Trashmouth. But I can handle it now. We don’t have to be afraid anymore, right?”

She met your eyes. It was a question in the same way it wasn’t, and you were reminded of the last time you watched her leave. It was enough to have you start tearing up.

“Yeah,” you said, throat tight. “We don’t.” 

Then you had laughed, a little shocked and still letting it all settle into your bones. How you’re all safe now. You’d all earned it. “Fuck, it’s really over, isn’t it? We’re really done. It’s—”

“Exciting,” Bev finished for you, grinning.

You scoffed, rolling your eyes in a poor mimic of Eddie, “I was going to say a fucking bummer, actually. I could really go for beating the fuck out of clown. Guess I’ll just have to put that craving on ice for thirty years again.”

“Beep fucking _beep_ , Richie,” Bev said, but she was laughing a little, forehead pressed into your shoulder as she snorted. 

As a kid, you’d used to work so hard to get her to laugh like that. A _real_ Beverly March laugh. It was still just as magical then as it was twenty-seven years ago. 

Some things don’t change, you figured, even when you had ‘grown up.’ 

But even that was a question, you thought. 

Because who were any of you anyway outside of your childhoods? Outside of the people who never had a chance to grow up right, so you grew sideways instead. 

Losing your childhood had done more than keep you all away from each other. It also kept you from yourselves.

“I’m telling you, Molly,” you’d cut in, shaking away the thought. “Next meet-up? You, me, two bats, some flamethrowers, and a clown. Maybe Benny boy too if you share some hunk. Now _that’s_ a fucking party.”

“Richie,” Ben said, blushing and grinning as he leaned in for his own hug. You’d let yourself breathe out into his shoulder, squeezing back when his grip tightened around you like he didn’t really want to let go.

“Take care, Trashmouth,” Bev whispered once Ben started walking to the car. She gave you a kiss on the cheek and winked as she pulled away. “Be kind to yourself. We have each other now.”

“Ah, yes,” you nodded. “People to answer to. Gifts to buy on holidays now. Shit, maybe I’ll just forget you guys again to save some sweet cash. Mary Jane’s pretty hard to finance for a wash-up, you know.”

Bev flipped you off, not looking back as she got into the front seat. You laughed so hard you were still hunched over when their car started.

You thought about what she’d said, about being kinder to yourself. And you knew it was said in the same way you had offered to look up her husband. Neither of you were joking, so you didn’t play it up.

Eddie waved as their car pulled away. You rocked back on your heels, dirt and blood caked all over your soles. Gross. 

You said, “And then there were two. When’s your flight again, Spaghetti?” 

You’d never liked lasting silences.

“Fuck off,” Eddie said, but it lacked heat. “At six. Mind driving me to the airport in your mid-life crisis car?”

So you’d both packed up and headed for the airport an hour later. Your own flight wasn’t for two hours after Eddie’s, but you didn’t mention it.

When you were about to pass the _Welcome to Derry!_ sign, it still felt like you were waiting for the pin to drop. To wake up from another vision. To see Eddie leaning over you, a claw through his chest and coughing blood on your face and saying _Rich! I did it! I think I killed It!_

Instead, Eddie said, “Slow down,” and rolled down his window to lean the front of his body out of the car before you’d even taken your foot off the gas.

“Holy shit!” you said, still reeling from the memory, hand automatically reaching out to grab Eddie’s shirt in some attempt to balance him. 

The Losers always pinned you for the troublemaker in the group, as if Eddie wasn’t always the one next to you, the one who had instigated the fight or yelled _fuck you, Richie!_ first.

Stan was the only one to see you both for what you were.

_Eddie started it_ , you’d say, pouting when Stan turned on you for a lecture about another detention slip. 

He didn’t like that your parents would just roll their eyes when you came home with the little pink papers for them to sign. Or the way they never asked about the bruises on your face, why you were always getting into fights, like they hadn’t even expected anything else. 

_I know_ , Stan would say, sighing and already longsuffering even at the early age of eleven, _but it’s because he’s always counting on you to end it._

Stan probably wouldn’t be surprised to see how little things have changed between you. Maybe more shocked about you being the rational one here for once. 

You’d yelped, still reaching for him, “Eddie you little fucking _minx, what the hell dude_ —” 

Then Eddie was shouting, “Fuck you! You piece of shit town! You oppressive drug enabling _motherfuckers_ _!_ _You abuse prompting serial killer breeding ground! Fucking bullshit, you_ —” just as angry as he was at eight, at eleven and thirteen and on the cusp of eighteen. 

And you’d watched all five-nine of him, red and raging and cursing in a way that would have made a weaker man blanch, and thought: _oh. That’s right._

But you’d already known, hadn’t you? Long before any of this had even slid the thought into full form. You’d known before the visions or the quarry or the Townhouse. 

You’d walked into Jade of the Orient with half a life you hadn’t given a shit about in your pocket and a gong at your back. And you had seen him, his nervous wave that still hadn’t changed in almost thirty years, and all you could think was: _oh._

And: _It’s you, again. Hello._

Because of course it was _‘again.’_ No one has ever awarded you points for originality anyway.

Eddie was still yelling when you ended up having to pull over. 

You were both only about five-hundred feet from the sign because you were wheezing so hard you started crying and Eddie took the opportunity to lecture you about the dangers of visibility while driving. 

_Goddammit, Richie! Have you been a safe driver once in your life?_ As if he hadn’t just leaned out the fucking _window_.

He ended up being thirty minutes early for his flight. So, basically late in Kaspbrak terms, as he informed you.

“I’m gonna miss you,” you said, when you hugged him, rules out the window when all you could think about was how much it was going to hurt losing him again now that you had him back. 

Eddie leaned back to look at you. “You’re going to call me though. Okay, asshole?” 

He was scowling again, hand chopping the air between you before settling on a stern finger point. 

You hugged him again. It was nearly involuntary.

“Of course,” you said, smiling so hard it hurt. “I have thirty years of calls to collect on, Eds. I’m gonna miss the sound of that sexy voice now that I know i’m not just fucking hallucinating it all.”

Eddie said, “Don’t call me Eds.” 

Then he pulled back. “Did you really think that?”

“Think what?”

“That you’d just— made it all up. That we weren’t real.”

It was as loaded of a question as you could get. “I’m still not sure if this one is even real, Eddie babe. Maybe it’s just more clown magic. But I’ll keep you updated. Oh shit, uh, I think the flight guy is saying something about—”

“Because it is.” You’d stared at him blankly until he rolled his eyes. “Real, Richie. This one’s real. I think we get to keep each other this time.”

And maybe the only actually funny thing about you is that your mouth never works when you need it to most. 

You wanted to say, _come to LA with me._ Or: _I don’t know how she treats you, but I don’t think it’s well, and you deserve everything good and only that._

Even just, _I really want this one to be real. I really want to keep you this time._

Not in the way his mother had, the way you suspected his wife was going to once he got home, smothered in bubble wrap and overflowing bottles of medicines he never even needed.

But Eddie had always been the brave one.

In the end, you’d just stood there, mouth opening and closing, until Eddie squeezed your arm with a small smile and backed away slowly, people starting to fill the plane.

“You better call me, dickwad. And try to come up with some actually funny lines next time.”

Which leads you to where you are now, two days later and settling back into your (not so) new life, your old one pressed up against the glass in 3D. Just trying to write something that would make the only people who matter to you _laugh_ as they fill up the groupchat with pictures.

The computer screen is still a solid white blank.

You think, _fuck me._ And Steve’s number lights up your phone.

It’s so quick you nearly drop it, cursing. Then you think, _fuck this actually,_ and answer it.

In your best butler Voice, you say, “Stevie, how may I be of assistance?” 

You’re met with silence. 

Which, okay. It’s not your best, you know that. You’re already nervous enough you start eyeing the trashcan in the corner. You’ve been dodging calls for almost a full week, so you can’t really blame the guy.

“Richie,” Steve starts, voice calm in a way that has cold sweat prickling at your neck. “I have three questions for you, and you are going to answer them right now. No bullshit.”

You lick your lips. “Uh, okay.”

“First,” Steve starts. “Are you high right now?” 

What the fuck.

“Uh, what the fuck. No, why—”

“Second,” Steve goes on, as if you never spoke. “And you have to be honest with me, Rich. Are you above level two?”

You flinch away from the phone.

Even without the onslaught of memories, you know this one: benders and a code system for relapses in case you feel back to level four—and then you have to stop thinking before you get sick.

It feels like a different life, but it’s still _your_ life, just not one you really wanted to have.

You realize the line’s been quiet for too long, “I don’t do that anymore. You know that.”

Steve’s dry laugh, and then, “Do I? Because all I know is that you bombed your last set, disappeared for a week, and have dodged all my calls since. It feels pretty fucking familiar, Rich.”

“It’s not,” you say, voice weaker than you’d like, closing your eyes as the past and present try to blend themselves together. “It’s not that, Steve, I’m sorry. I just—”

You’re scrambling. 

Blood on the library floor. Bower’s skull crunching in. Eddie above you. Below you. Bev screaming. Eddie’s blood on your glasses _._ Eddie saying goodbye at the gate. _You shouldn’t touch other boys, Richie_ _—_

“My best friend from high school killed himself,” a voice that sounds almost too hoarse to be yours says. “We found out last week. I got the call right before the show and I freaked out. It’s just been a lot.”

You can hear Steve soften over the phone. “Richie, fuck. I’m so sorry, man. I had no idea that’s what that call was.”

You can’t help your laugh. “Yeah, me either.”

Steve releases a breath, lets it echo across the line.

Then you ask, “So what was the third question?”

“Oh, uh,” Steve sounds sheepish, which is enough for you to raise an eyebrow at, even if he can’t see you. “I was gonna try to nail down your location. Get some names. Your phone’s GPS system is shit, dude.”

“Steve,” you coo in your best southern Voice, slapping a hand against your chest. Vulnerability is not something you want to touch right now, and Steve is offering it to you in buckets. “I had no idea you cared like that. If you wanted to make out, all you had to do was ask.” 

Oops, still way too close.

“Oh, fuck you, Rich,” Steve hisses.

“Hey, fuck you, dude! One of my best friends just killed himself!”

“ _Jesus Christ,_ Rich. You cannot _joke_ about that man. Fuck.”

You know exactly why Steve is so touchy with you joking about Stan killing himself, and that knowledge chills you down to your bones. 

You finally set the computer aside, running a hand down your face. “Sorry. I just—”

“It’s been a lot,” Steve finishes for you, and you hum into the line. Your phone keeps buzzing to remind you of group chat notifications.

You put Steve on speaker and click on the chat. Twenty-two messages total and only one from Eddie.

_Landed safely. I still remember you all._

God, he even grew up to be the same neurotic kid who carried two fanny packs everywhere he went. No nonsense unless he felt like giving you back your own bullshit.

You realize Steve has been saying something. “Sorry, what was that?”

“I said,” Steve starts, sounding more pissy now that it’s been confirmed you aren’t coked out in someone’s basement. “You still have that Netflix meeting coming up. For that special you wanted? I think I’d be good for us to meet and establish a few things first.”

Oh, you had wanted that, hadn’t you? Or _pre-Richie_ Richie had wanted that. What even was your plan? To spew up some more straight man bullshit your ghost writers would push on you? 

Steve says, “I think this could be a good re-branding opportunity, Rich. Especially with the way you bombed your last set.”

_Be kinder to yourself, Trashmouth_ — Bev laughing. Crying. Pulling you out of Neibolt— _We have each other, now. We don’t have to be afraid anymore_ — The quarry. Eddie over you. _We can still save him!_ Blood in your glasses—

_I think we get to keep this one, Rich._

“Yeah,” you say, watching your screen flicker to black until it’s just you, staring into your own reflection. 

“Okay. I think I can do that.”

  
  


.

  
  
  


Eddie says, “Mom bought graduation tickets today.” 

It’s evening now, and you’re both in your bedroom, door closed and window open to let in the night air. 

It’s nearly summer again, and it’s unbearable the same way summers will always be for you now: all unsure endings with no beginnings in sight.

“I’m surprised she’s even letting me walk. Do you know the risk of contagion exposure in large groups like that?”

The Beach Boys are crooning across the room on your record player, and you’re both lying on your bed. Eddie’s thigh is pressed up against yours, and you try to memorize it, imprint the scene into your memory vault. File it under: _I want to keep this_. Even if you aren’t sure if you can.

Instead, you say: “Oh, Spaghetti, she knows _all_ about the risk from the millions of times she’s been exposed to _my_ large—”

He hits you with a pillow, knocking your glasses sideways.

He’s still screaming, the Beach Boys singing, _then we wouldn’t have to wait so long_ around you both as you laugh so hard you’re grabbing your stomach, saying _wait, wait, holy shit, dude. Stop, I’m_ _—_ wheezing all the way.

When he stops, he’s still glaring at you, holding the pillow under his arms as a shield while he sits up. “You are such a dick, _no, Richie, I swear if you say it_ — God, I can’t believe I still hang out with you.”

But he’s smiling now, so you know you haven’t fucked up bad enough for him to mean it. You sit up too, following him and pretending not to notice the way you let your ankles press together.

“Graduation,” you say, rolling the word around in your mouth. It tastes stale, like ash on your lips and reading _ending_ in bright red lights. “You ever wonder where Bill and Stan decided to go?”

Bill moved out of Derry the beginning of your Junior year and Stan left two months after. 

None of you expected to hear from them again, but it didn’t make it hurt any less. You’d made sure to draw something less-than tasteful on every page of one of Stan’s favorite bird books before he left.

It helped to even out the sentiment you’d written on the last page next to your phone number, like the crudeness could cut through the risk of vulnerability— _I’ve decided to name every bird I see “Stan” to amass an army in your honor. They will be some evil motherfuckers who only glare and shit on everything, just like you!_

And then, smaller: _I’ll miss you, Stan. Please don’t forget us._

But no call ever came. No letters from him or Bill. The clubhouse is quieter, now, with just you, Eddie, Mike, and Ben. They’re still your friends, but the circle feels more like the remaining cracks rather than a smaller shape.

A month after Stan left, you became so afraid you’d wake up and forget them all that you carved their names into your bedpost. And if it reminded you of another part of town where you’d done the same thing, no one else had to know.

“Bill always wanted to go into something with writing,” Eddie says, shrugging, but he’s not meeting your eyes. “I always thought we’d go to NYU together, but I wouldn’t bet on it now.”

And there it is, of course, the reminder of what’s slipping out of your hands right in front of you. Four weeks now before Eddie leaves to find an apartment in New York, after enough arguing with his mother that he had to stay over at your place twice. 

He treated it as if you minded him staying. 

As if you didn’t already hate his mother even more for pressuring Eddie to stay close, for keeping Derry’s teeth in him a little longer.

“Right,” you say, nodding like it isn’t a big deal, like you won’t know when you’ll see your best friend again after this month. “NYU. That’s exciting, dude. Make sure not to puke at any ragers, I hear chicks aren't into that.”

Eddie’s face scrunches up in disgust. “Fuck off, I’m not doing any of that shit. You know that.”

You do know that, actually. You can’t imagine Eddie Kaspbrak at a party, drinking with someone that isn’t a Loser, or getting busy with any hot girl who’d be an idiot to pass him up. 

You know it the same way you’ve been getting your teeth knocked in more lately: inevitably and empty and waiting on something you can’t have.

Ever since you skipped out on prom and talked more shit about your dating life, you started making up fake girlfriends — who let you get to third base, _you heard it here Hanscom_ — as if women interest you at all, and other kids started turning into sharks catching the scent of blood in the water.

Because the people in Derry — the ones who laugh about all the kids dying from the AIDs crisis Eddie won’t shut up about. The ones who ignore the increased hate-crime statistics stemming from it — have started noticing too, following Bowers’ lead and trying to finish you off for him, as if the slurs and graffiti weren’t enough.

You’re bruised blue under your shirt and tired of looking over your shoulder on the way home. Sick of pressing frozen peas to your face in an empty living room.

So you’re losing your best friend, but you’re also losing Derry. It should be sweeter than this, but it isn’t, because it still isn’t an even loss.

You shake your head, trying to dislodge the thought, say, “Well some of us will. I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here, dude.”

And you can’t look at him, so you look out your bedroom window instead. 

You feel the words rough in your throat, truth honey-coated into something else like those disgusting cough drops Eddie always has.

“As soon as school ends, I’m getting out of here. I’m going to California and I’m never coming back. Maybe we can learn something from Stan and Bill.”

Eddie’s still quiet, so you muster up the courage to turn and look at him. He’s staring at you, and he looks sad. He looks like you’ve just lied to his face instead of saying the closest thing you can to the truth.

It’s unbearable.

“You could come with me,” you blurt out. The Beach Boys have stopped playing, the record no longer spinning around the needle, but the room still feels loud even in the silence.

You go on, not giving yourself the time to contemplate how much you mean it, how much you want it or how much you hate yourself for both.

“We can go to California. You’re a genius, Eds. You could get into UCLA no sweat, and I can get a full-time job somewhere. Try out open mics on the weekends. We could be roommates, even. We could leave together. Get Derry out of the fucking picture.”

You imagine a road trip across the country. Apartment hunting and daily routine cleanings with Eddie’s specialty rubber gloves. You imagine working days while Eddie goes to school and coming home in time for you to make you both dinner. 

You think of laughter, of a place for the two of you, with Derry becoming a blur in the rear-view mirror.

“Richie,” Eddie says, soft into the buzzing quiet. “You know I can’t do that.”

And the bubble, the happy ending glass charade you’ve convinced yourself a future inside of, shatters. 

Your shoulders slump and you laugh in a way that doesn’t sound like you at all, turning back to the window so you don’t have to see his face. 

One more month and you’ll both be gone, but you still hope you’ll ever forget him.

“Yeah,” you hear yourself say, like you’re somewhere else, still trying to imagine the life you planned out, all the nightly dish washing dances by the sink, hands brushing across plates.

“I know.”

  
  
.  
  


You forgot how much you miss Stan.

It’s like a phantom pain in your chest, an ever present ache. You’ve never been good with grief. 

No one ever is, but you saw all of the lifetimes you were forced to live with it. The present shape you’d have to spend the rest of your life without. 

You know you need to do something, but you still aren’t sure what. When you ask Mike for Patricia Uris’ phone number, he doesn’t say anything to you about it. 

He doesn’t have to. Mike always understood the bond between you and Stan the same way you understood the bond between him and Bill. It was intrinsic— magical, almost, to care about someone that much.

It’s two weeks for you to psych yourself up enough to save the number and another four days to actually dial.

To your surprise, the call connects after the first ring. 

“Hello?” Patricia Uris says, voice quiet but kind in your ear. “Who is this?”

It should be easy, in theory, to answer. You talk, that’s what you do; it’s what you’re known for. It’s what you are, buried so deep you think it must be pressed into your DNA. 

And yet, now you can’t. 

It feels like you’re underwater. Like you’re drowning. It’s the moment of impact when you would jump off the cliff in the quarry, opening your eyes just to find Stan rolling his at you all the way across the water.

“Hello?” Patricia repeats. “I really hope this isn’t another one of those sales calls. You know I’ve told you before I _—”_

“Sorry,” you cut in, babbling too loud in the stunned silence. “Sorry, uh, I wasn’t sure if you’d pick up so _—,”_

Lie. You weren’t even sure you’d actually call. “My name is Richie. Richie Tozier? I _—_ I grew up with your husband, Stanley.”

The name feels like ash on your tongue, but Patrica doesn’t say anything. Instead, she makes polite humming noises as you babble on. 

It makes sense, of course, that Stan would marry a nice person. Stan was the kindest person you’ve ever known. You almost cry from it.

“Oh,” she says, her voice quiet on the other line but still inexplicably kind. “The comedian? Were you one of Stanley’s old friends then? One of you called a few months ago, I believe. Bill, was it? I’m sorry, I’m afraid he never told me too much about you all.”

There’s more there that goes unsaid there, but you know better than to touch it.

Still, it’s tricky, messy in all the wrong ways. Because you never got to know her Stan. Adult Stanley Uris who loved his wife and home and childhood friends enough to think that taking himself out of it might keep them alive.

“Yeah,” you start, and you cough to clear the crack from your voice. “We grew up together, actually. Childhood friends. He was my best friend as a kid, before he moved away. He used to take care of me. All of us, really, but I knew him the longest, so I guess I won the biggest burden award.”

She hums, and you hope you’ve done something right by her in calling. That you haven’t fucked it up already. 

She says, surprising you by not having hung up, “That sounds like Stanley. He always cares so much, so deeply. I could never understand that kind of conviction. It’s as if he was born to be kind.”

Present tense. You close your eyes, take a breath.

“He could be such a little bastard too,” you start, chuckling without meaning to, your shoulders dropping their tension when she lets out her own little snort. 

“He would get so mad at me when I wouldn’t listen to him. _Richie, you can’t ride on my handle bars anymore, you’re too tall. Richie, you’re going to fall on your head and then I’m going to laugh._ ”

Patricia’s own laughter echoes down the phone line, muffled like she’s pressed a hand against her mouth to keep it inside. 

You like her already. You imagine, in another life, a real reunion with all the Losers. Where Stan shows up, bringing Patty with him. All of you laughing and loving and watching your best friend get a happy ending he deserved.

“People would call him ‘uptight’,” you tell her. “But we knew that was just the way he cared, in preventative measures and snark.” 

She sighs as the laughter tampers off. The quiet is comfortable. You hadn’t expected that. You hadn’t expected any of this, like little puzzle pieces falling together.

“Can I tell you something?” She asks into the quiet, like you’re both conspiring. And maybe you are. Conspiring about your shared love for a person you’ll both never see again.

“I’d love to hear it.”

“Our friends always thought he was so serious,” Patricia says. “All the time! He would say the funniest things, but no one else ever realized when he was joking.”

She’s smiling, you can feel it. In the story. On your cheek, pressed against the phone and connected to a city thousands of miles away.

You ask, feeling your own small smile, “But you did, huh?” And she scoffs into the speaker.

“He’s the funniest person I’ve ever known,” she says. “And when I told him that, on what must have been our second date, he stared at me like he thought _I_ was the one joking. And then he blushed so hard his entire face turned pink.”

You can see it. Tall and gangly college student Stanley Uris, dressed up all proper for the woman who would one day become his wife and flushing pink while she laughs at something no one else has ever caught onto, reaching out for his hand so that he knows its kind.

“He’s always been the best of us,” you say, and it may be the truest thing you’ve ever said. “He showed up when it mattered, and he cared more than I think I ever could.”

“Yes, he’s always been like that, hasn’t he?” Patricia says, and her voice floats, like she’s next to you and also thousands of miles away. 

“Yeah,” you say. “Stan always knew how to love us the right way. Even when we didn’t know how to ask for it.”

Patricia hums. “You know, I don’t think Stanley ever knew how to hide his love. But mostly? I don’t think it ever occurred to him to try.”

  
  


.

  
  
  
  


You write Eddie a letter, the week before graduation.

You keep it anonymous. Nothing too revealing. Nothing that could be traced back to you, but something for him to keep, something to say all the kind things you can never get right when you say them yourself, if you even try at all. 

It’s still far more caring than your own letter, the one Bill had made you write after that summer of ‘89. That alone continues to feed the fear gnawing at you as you think about the envelope buried at the bottom of your bag, sitting in the bleachers and watching teachers talk about seating over your second graduation practice of the week. 

This practice is quick. A week before the real thing and teachers who’ve been telling you how to sit right for over ten years still haven’t learned their lesson about how little you care to listen. 

You stay in the guest stands, cheering loud enough to make Ben blush, to have Eddie rolling his eyes and flipping you off when he stepped off stage. But they both still smile.

Mike sits beside you, and you turn back to him a few times for quick faces and stupid impressions that have him laughing with what Stan once called _loving indulgence_.

You didn’t care about walking yourself, so you hadn’t bothered to sign up for practice. Instead, you ducked out of class ten minutes before Eddie was supposed to walk off stage and snuck back to Mike’s row, all smiles and laughs while the other kids around you continued to look miserable.

Before she’d left, you used to smoke with Bev behind the bleachers in middle school. One day, you’d said some stupid joke about Greta’s latest graffiti piece, and Bev had snorted, saying, “High school with her is going to be hell.”

And five years later, with Bev gone for four, she’s still right. High school in itself, even without Greta’s bullshit, has been hell.

You don’t care about school the same way Derry doesn’t care about kids like you: with an intensity strong enough hurt. It got bad enough that you’d almost dropped out junior year, not sure how many more bathroom beatings you could take, or how much longer you could stay alive by looking twice over your shoulder.

You had a car and a license and enough savings under your bed to get you to California. But in the end, you hadn’t.

Eddie and Mike had lectured you about how hard it is to get a diploma as a drop-out, and so you hadn’t, but it wasn’t because of that.

It was because even if you left, Eddie would still be here. In Derry with Ben and Mike, and the thought of disappearing felt like losing more than you'd be willing to give. Felt like a cold fear shaping the word _missing_ around your lips that you couldn’t trace back.

So you stayed, and you sucked it up, and you got better at focusing the beating onto you exclusively and almost as good at hiding them.

The first time someone outside of Bowers called you a _sissy little queer_ , you’d frozen up, wondering how everyone could still smell it on you. It was freshman year, and Eddie still wouldn’t shut up about the AIDS crisis, Reagan signs littering the yards of nearly every house you passed, and how all of it made you want to scream and you wouldn’t let yourself think about why.

Things hadn’t gotten better, but you’d gotten better at keeping them buried away.

Now, you watch Mrs. Henderson deliver the same poorly rehearsed speech she’s given for at least twenty years. It’s bullshit, all of it, but Mike had looked so excited about the idea of a formal graduation ceremony when Eddie mentioned it, that you bite your tongue. You regret it a little bit, now. 

Mrs. Henderson is standing on the stage, all eyes on her and saying, _Graduation is a transition, out of the old and into the new. You’re going to become new people. Not overnight, but eventually. This ceremony is both a mourning for your last steps as well as a celebration for your new ones._

She smiles, a bland school appropriate smile, and says, _We are never the same people we were in high school again_. 

And the picture—freezes, a chill running down your back as no one adds anything. No one interrupts or questions, just continues watching in apathetic silence.

Mike says, “It’s weird to think about, isn’t it?”

“Weird?” You echo, mind caught on a loop of _again_ . Of _never_. Of what it can mean for you outside of Derry, the person you can make yourself into, heartbeat in your throat.

“That it’s ending,” Mike says, not sounding sad, but resigned. Accepting of something you can’t place. “I always thought there would be more to it than this. Than just—moving on. Forgetting and getting to leave. It just feels unfinished, I guess.”

There’s a joke there. Low hanging fruit Mike’s waiting for you to take, but you feel too far away from it, still replaying Mrs. Henderson’s words as the crowd starts to rise from their seats and break apart in front of you.

You say, voice small, “I don’t want to forget, Mike.”

And Mike nods, mouth set in a line that you wish you could shape into a laugh. “Yeah, I don’t want you to either.”

Questions rise on your tongue like sunlight, and you turn to really look at him. You want to ask, _what do you mean ‘I’?_ Or, _do you feel it too?_ Even just, _how do we stop forgetting_? 

You open your mouth, questions overriding each other, only to be cut off by footsteps coming towards you.

“Hey, fuckface,” Eddie says, walking towards you both, eyebrows raised like he’s annoyed but grinning wide enough to mean it’s just for show. “Mr. Smith said if you pull that shit again, you’re getting another Saturday school.”

Beside you, Mike chuckles, some of the tension between you slipping away.

“Shit,” you say, falling into the role, smirk plastered on your face and winking. “If Mr. Smith wanted me that bad, all he had to do was ask.”

Eddie wrinkles his nose, swatting you away as you lean forward on the seat in front, overlapping your arms and laughing when he adds, “You are so fucking disgusting.”

“A girl has to keep her calling card full at all times, Eds,” you say, adding on a southern Voice and reaching out a hand to flick in the middle of his forehead, pulling back as he tries to hit you back. “I can’t afford to be picky.”

“Still,” Ben says, smiling softly. “Thanks for cheering, Richie. It was nice.”

“Maybe for you,” Mike says. “I think my eardrums are busted.”

Dodging two more jabs from Eddie, you all stand to leave, grabbing your bags from the bleachers and heading out to Mike’s truck.

You stall in the mostly empty hallway, shrugging when Eddie turns back with a puzzled look.

“Fuck, I think I forgot my lab homework,” you say, the lie rolling smooth off your tongue. “You guys go ahead. I’ll catch up.”  
  
“Are you sure?” Ben asks. 

After you say _yes, you are_ and _yes, you drove separately. You’ll meet them at the clubhouse in a little bit,_ the three of them finally leave, Eddie flipping you off without turning around when you wolf-whistle behind him.

You slip into the bathroom, count down ten minutes and pull out the envelope once you’re sure the hallways will be clear. When you come back out, it’s mostly empty, just a few classroom lights still on but no one really around enough to see you.

When you pass Eddie’s locker, you check over your shoulder, twice, three times, before shoving the letter through the middle slit, not hesitating and walking right back through the school doors and into your own beatdown car.

On your way to the clubhouse, you can’t stop yourself from wondering what Eddie will think when he finds the letter. If he’ll think it’s a love note or some kind of joke.

It’s possibly the kindest thing you’ve ever done. Or maybe it’s the cruelest. 

_Well_ , you think, remembering Mike’s frown. You’ve never been one for self-preservation anyway.

  
  


.

  
  


When your phone lights up behind you, you’re three drinks in and leaning over your balcony railing.

For a moment, you think about just letting it ring. The night is still cooler now in January than it usually is in LA, but not by much, and you try to make yourself fall back into it.

It’s not that you’re dodging any calls in particular. You wrote some new material today. Talked to Steve over the phone about some more shit you’ve been putting off. You’ve been productive. You’re just— tired, is all.

You know you shouldn’t be dodging calls. You don’t have to do that anymore. You have people who care about you, more friends’ numbers in your phone than hookups. People who really want what’s best for you, and, well— that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? That you’ve never known how to hold onto a good thing once you realize you’ve got it.

The glass on the side table vibrates with every ring, getting louder as the glass moves the phone closer. In the end, it’s not really much of a choice at all.

Reaching back without looking away from the LA skyline, you swipe the screen, “Trashmouth Tozier, baby. You’re live in three, two, one— go!”

“You really haven’t changed, have you?” Eddie’s voice says, snapping tension right back into your body, making you stand straighter before you can think about it. “Did you learn anything new the past twenty-seven years?”

“Uh,” you say, still a bit shocked to hear Eddie’s voice coming through the speaker instead of Bev’s or Steve’s. “I learned I can get paid to talk about how sad my life is.”

Eddie doesn’t reply right away, the sound of something shuffling tearing down the line, giving you enough time to relax. 

“Sad?” Eddie scoffs. “Poor Mr. C-list celebrity. Why don’t you go cry in your own fucking backyard pool.”

You’re smiling before you’re even conscious of it. “This is coming from a Wall-Street man himself, Eds. Pretty sure you could buy and sell me. Besides, people love an underdog, you know? Even more than that, they love hearing confirmation that they’re at least a social step-higher than said underdog. I get money, they get less sad— everyone wins!”

“Do they?” Eddie asks, something in his tone quieter now that the shuffling has ended. You hear a door slide shut across the line. “Does everyone really win?”

“So I’m told,” you say, straightening your back to lean further on the railing. “Haven’t really seen the results myself, Eds. You wanna tell me why you called?”

Eddie says, “Don’t call me Eds.” Then:

“What would the results look like, anyway?”

You know a distraction when you hear one, knew the technique before seven with dirt all over your face and a furious Sonia Kaspbrak pulling an equally muddy Eddie inside. But you let it fly, too elated to hear Eddie’s voice in your ear for the first time in a month.

“Again, I’m gonna throw that one back at you, Mr. Anal-risk.”

“You've never been funny,” Eddie says. “I have no idea why people pay you absurd amounts of money just to tell the same jokes as a middle-schooler with an anatomy textbook.”

“Hey,” you say, but you’re laughing too, mock-offense nearly forgotten as soon as it arrives. “Back off my source material, dude. I’ve been perfecting this shit since I was ten.”

“‘ _Perfecting_.’”

“Fuck you, man. I’m funny! I’m so fucking funny that I even made Stan cry laughing in like, what was it, eighth grade?”

“Bullshit. Now you’re really lying.”

“Fuck off! No, I really did! We were at our lockers between some classes, and I said something stupid. Probably. I don’t really remember.”

Eddie snorts, and you grin.

Eddie’s breathing echoes across the line, laugh blending with your view of the skyline in a way that makes your shoulders losen. It’s almost nine o’clock your time. You have no idea about Eddie.

When the quiet falls between you both, you think about asking him again why he called. Or maybe why he took so long to do it. But he beats you to it.

“Hey,” Eddie says, pulling you from your thoughts. “What you said— about how everyone wins? I don’t think that’s true.”

You let out a breath, “No?”

“No,” Eddie repeats. You can all but see him shaking his head. That nervous tick he’d used to pull when calling his mom from your landline, saying, _Mommy, it’s getting really late. It’d be safer if I stayed at Richie’s, don’t you think?_ In a way that made you realize what a good fucking liar Eddie Kaspbrak was too. 

Eddie says, “I don’t think losing Stan still counts as winning.” 

And your stomach twists. You think of Stan in the hallway, laughing. Stan at the clubhouse, taking up for you. Stan at his bar mitzvah. Stan at six, eight, eleven— always having your back, following until the end of the line. “No. It doesn’t.”

“And Georgie,” Eddie goes on, getting louder. “Betty Ripsom. The kid at that fair. The whole fucking clown, obviously. None of that...none of that seems like winning. It’s too much losing.”

Your throat feels raw. “Twenty-seven years is a long time, Eds. It’s a lot of time to lose.” 

And it is. Long enough to shape a person and long enough to keep you all separated, suspended and waiting for the joke.

Twenty-seven years of forgetting how to be a person the right way. Twenty-fucking-seven years of forgetting everything. Of losing Stan and Eddie and Mike to a town that didn’t deserve any of them. All the shit you learned about yourselves that summer, and for what? 

“Fucking hell, Rich,” Eddie says, like he’s following your thoughts. Or maybe you’d said some of it outloud. “All of it— and for what? Just to do it _again_? At least this time we had more than a goddamn slingshot, and— what was it you pulled out? A kid’s aluminum bat?”

“Fuck,” you laugh, a hand slipping down your face to cover your mouth. “I forgot about that. How did we not die? We should be dead. You don’t climb into the sewers to kill a monster at twelve and actually get back out. That’s—“ 

“A .0145% chance of success,” Eddie says.

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” you say, mouth suddenly dry. “Of course you calculated it. What the fuck did you even use as factors for that?”

You can’t see him, but you know Eddie’s shrugging against the phone. 

“Honestly?” Eddie asks. “Our age range, weapons of choice, our average injury rate from Bowers, and a few other things I could barely remember. I did the calculation pretty early-on after the call from Mike.”

You let the words sink into the quiet between you. You should leave it alone, you know this. Shouldn't say anything in risk of tipping further into _Do Not Touch_ territory. 

You ask, “What was Bower’s average?” Because you’ve never once been able to keep your mouth shut when you should.

“Fuck, dude. With the way he caught you at least once a week? It was pretty fucking high without even touching the statics on the rest of us.” 

_We should be dead_ , you think. 

Then: _Eddie was dead_. 

And you press the heels of your hands into your eyes until you see aftershapes. 

“You know,” Eddie says, his tone light in a way that has you going cold with dread, warm crawling up your throat. “I ran the numbers. When Mike called us back. Do you want to know what the success rate was then?”

You can’t stomach the thought, bile rising fast. “Fucking shit, _no_.”

“3.428%,” Eddie continues, like you hadn’t spoken, or he didn’t hear you, or he’s forgot he’s still talking to you at all. “There was a 3.428% chance that we would all survive. Not accounting for injuries or aftermath consequences. Just to go into the house and make it back out.”

“And you came anyway,” you say, quiet. 

“Well, yeah,” He says, almost sounding normal, if you didn’t know him well enough to look for the extra breaths. “It was you guys. It’s— it’s always been you guys.”

Eddie smiling above you. Laughing. Choking. Saying your name and staring at his own blood. Washing that same blood off your glasses. 

“What you said to me, Rich? About being brave?” His voice has gone quiet. You have to pull the phone closer. “I’ve only been able to do that with you guys. I don’t know why but...”

“But?”

Eddie laughs, and you can hear his head shaking across the line. “But I’ve never been as brave as I am with you.”

“Well, Eds,” you say, closing your eyes and trying to breathe. “I think I know the feeling.”

.

  
  


At sixteen, a month after Bill moved away and two before Stan would, you invite yourself over to the Uris house for a sleepover.

“What,” Stan says, opening the door, eyebrows already raised before catching sight of you and turning a pale white. 

“What?” You ask, the false picture of innocence with your right eye blue and lips swollen bloody, red crusted around your nose. “Is that all I get? Do I really need a good reason to visit my best friend?”

Stan just says, “Jesus Christ, Richie.” Before he’s pulling you inside and slamming the door, double-bolting it behind you like it could actually keep anything that hurt you out. You still appreciate the sentiment.

“Does that still count as a swear?” You ask, letting yourself be led up the stairs and into Stan’s bathroom through the eerie quiet of the Uris house. “Since you don’t believe in the guy. Does that still count?”

Stan pushes you onto the toilet seat, already turning to shuffle through the shelf cabinets, “Shut up.”

When you don’t say anything else, Stan lowers his arms from the cabinets and turns to face you. He looks concerned, even more than usual, which is saying something.

“Here,” he says, dumping a pile of bandages, pills, and liquid assortments that have you dizzy from looking at their bubble font brands. “Tilt your head towards me. Let’s clean this up.”

Stan pulls out a white washcloth, wets it, and gently places it over your eye in a way that still makes you hiss. 

“Sorry,” he says absently, reaching behind him to grab some gauze to dab under your nose. You don’t ask why he has all of this stuff at the ready. You’ve seen it enough times to know. You still wish you hadn’t. “Plug that up with this. Hold the washcloth above your eye, too. I gotta get something.”

The Uris house is unsettling on the best of days, but at almost eleven at night, with just you and Stan lurking like ghosts, you feel unsettled in a way you can’t place without your head hurting. 

When Stan comes back into the room, he’s holding out a sweatshirt and sweatpants a size too small that you know will ride up on your ankles, “Put these on. Then I’ll disinfect the cuts, okay?”

“Okay,” you say, turning around and stripping out of your clothes, hearing Stan gasp quietly behind you as you pull your own hoodie off.

“Christ, Richie,” Stan says, paler than he was at the door when you turn back to face him, new clothes finally on and already warming you up. “Did someone hit you with their fucking car?”

“Close,” you say, taking back your seat on the toilet and closing your eyes as Stan leans back into your space. “But not quite. That would have been pretty funny though, huh?”

Stan says, sharp and fierce, “No, it would not be _funny_ , Richie. Don’t fucking say that.”

You say, “I think you’ve just said ‘fuck’ more times in the past five minutes than the whole twelve years I’ve known you. Do I really look that shitty?”

Stan doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t have to. You caught your reflection in a puddle on the way over, and you aren’t eager to look again anytime soon. 

You must zone out because when you blink Stan is looking at you like you’ve just done something terrible. Or had something terrible done to you. Or you are something terrible. 

“What?”

“I asked who it was.” 

“Oh,” you say, the words lose in your mouth. “No thanks.’

Stan blinks. “‘No thanks?’”

“Yeah,” you say, almost shrugging before you remember how hard you hit your shoulder when landing. “No thanks. I’m good. It’s not gonna change anything anyway.” 

Stan presses his lips together until their white, leaning back in to disinfect your cheek.

“How’d you know?” You finally ask, nodding to the shirt he gave you. It’s your favorite of his. You used to steal it all the time because it was so comforting, not just the material but the fact that it was Stan’s. It was safe. You stretched it out too long with your growth spurt at fifteen, but he kept it anyway. Still, he only lets you borrow it on special occasions. “That it was this bad?”

You don’t know why, but you feel like channeling all your remaining courage into your mouth. You want to be seen and invisible at once. You want, you realize, for Stan to know without you having to tell him. 

Stan shrugs, dabbing your eyebrow as you curse quietly. “You stopped talking.”

You stare at him. “That’s it? That was the clue? Not the huge fucking bruise on my face or the fucking busted lip?”

Stan rolls his eyes, but they’re softer than usual, still concerned. “Well, Richie, I gotta say those were some great context clues. But no. It was the fact you listened to me for the first time ever and shut the fuck up when I told you to.”

And the thing about Stan is well— Stan doesn’t curse. It’s like you said before. 

It’s not usual. Not like you and Eddie and even Bev, back in the day. The last time you heard him cuss was with you at one of the older kids who’d thrown the word _queer_ around Eddie and laughed when he flushed pink in embarrassment. 

Cursing, you think, giddy with waning adrenaline and head tingly from where he’s pressing antiseptic to it, must be Stan’s love language.

And suddenly— suddenly, you feel brave with it. You feel angry. You’re terrified of what just happened to you and you’re angry that it will happen again no matter if you continue to hide or not.

“Stan,” you start, something in your voice somber enough to have him meeting your eyes. “Stan, I...I have to tell you something.”

Stan nods, leaning back far enough that he can look at your face but still close enough to show he isn’t leaving, that he’s not afraid of you. And god, you want that to last. You want it to fucking last.

“I—,” you start, tongue heavy in your mouth as your heart beats faster, chest seizing up like Eddie’s does when he has one of his asthma attacks. 

And it hits you, again, that you aren’t brave. You aren’t brave like the rest of them. You don’t want people to know. You want to hide, but even then you aren’t really safe, are you? 

“Stan,” you say, voice cracking in a way that has Stan’s face falling. “I— you have to know, don’t you? You have to know about me, right? I— I don’t know how everyone knows, but you— you have to know too, then, don’t you?”

You want to close your eyes. You want to wash up in the quarry and never open your eyes again, take your shitty car and drive it off the side of the fucking kissing bridge. But instead you’re here— facing your best friend and hoping you won’t get replaced because of it. Another beating you can take. Anything else, well. You have to brace yourself for it.

“Richie,” Stan says carefully, a frown on his lips but eyes angry in a way you haven’t seen since his bar mitzvah three summers ago. “I only know what you want me to know, okay? Nothing more and nothing less. Whatever you want.”

When you start to cry, it feels inexplicably like a loss you don’t have a name for.

You only know when you start because your now black eye throbs with it seconds before you’re falling apart. Then it’s just you and Stan and a list of medical supplies too long for any of you to really own, but you still do.

Because there are fucked up things in Derry. People who want to kill you, even if you’ll still know their face afterwards. Even after they corner you in the drug store and leave you bloody and bruised on the sidewalk in plain sight, more slurs on their lips than kids in Derry.

You’re sobbing, pulling your knees up to your chest and burying your face in them as Stan makes a distressed noise and rubs at your back.

Finally, when you can breathe again, you say, “I don’t think I know what I want.”

“That’s fine too,” Stan says, still sitting close to you even though he knows now. He knows what you are. He’s seen you, you realize, and he didn’t turn away. “Whatever you need, Rich.”

You nod. 

Suddenly, you want to make all of this into a joke. You want to fragment the moment in a way that makes it indiscernible. You want to break it down into pieces and never be seen again until you’re sick with it. 

And you know Stan would let you. He’d laugh at your first shitty joke and he'd keep it all quiet, bandage you up and let you sleep in the air mattress in his room with your favorite blanket you keep here for moments like these.

But Stan, the one person who’s ever known what you need before you know it, says, “So, how’d the other guy look?”

You snort, snot still running down your face but having to cover your mouth to keep from waking up his parents as it turns into giggling. Stan smiles a little while you crack up.

“I don’t know,” you say. “He was still pretty fucked up after walking in on me going down on his mom like that.”

Stan nods, somber, and like the funniest person you fucking know, says, “No step-father of the year award for you then.”

Stan has to catch you as you fall forward, arms braced over your bruised stomach as you laugh hard enough to be heard four houses over.

  
  
  


.

  
You never talked about _It_ after that summer. At least, nothing past the occasional implication. 

The clown had started to slip away after Bev left and from there everything started trickling down. Your teen years in Derry felt like a countdown, a build-up, even though one of the worst things in that town had already happened to you.

It’s the forgetting, the way it trapped each of you inside, that comes back. How you never addressed the things that made you all afraid; you just stuck together instead. Almost thirty years and all of the memories lost between them are now pouring through your hands like water.  
  
You never talked about it, but the closest you got was Bev, under the bleachers two months before she moved, comparing rumors and trying to ignore how much of a mark the clown had left on you two.  
  
You’re in the meeting Steve wanted when you remember. Steve is still talking.  
  
He’s saying something about a new special you asked for, so you know you can’t be mad he’s talking over your sudden fucking enlightenment. 

He doesn’t know about how you never even let yourself sneeze in the direction of any boy who caught your eye, who could have possible wanted you back, because you couldn’t get the fucking clown out of your head.  
  


Bev and Eddie got brave after coming back, and Ben and Mike are less lonely now with the six of you. Bill has friends who understand his grief with love. 

And what did you get? You came out to the Losers, still so fucking afraid but also knowing it was your safest bet. Your own trial run. So, what now? 

Even after everything, you’re still afraid. 

Steve is mentioning something about promotions, but all you can think about is Derry, about the fear that surpasses the fucking clown thirty years down the road, and suddenly you’re angry— no, you’re white hot furious. 

You’re drowning in everything you didn’t know how to name for thirty years that manifested into where you are now, alone and sad and still a man who loves men. A Derry born boy who loves boys while also knowing he was always one foot fall away from getting killed for it.  
  
Steve says, “I think the producers would like if we squeezed the act between—“  
  
You say, “I want to come out.”

Your voice cracks, far too loud for the quiet room, for just the two of you and the walls.  
  
Silence. A flood of delayed panic you’ve been pushing down since you remembered thirteen year old Beverly talking about crushes and all you could think about were pills and fanny packs and holding your best friend’s hand.  
  
You know, realistically, that the hate crime rate in California is much lower than Derry’s. Much lower in 2016 than 1989, but that doesn’t stop the cold sweat bleeding across your back, or the way you start calculating how you could get around Steve if he tries to attack you.  
  
Steve blinks. Once. Twice.  
  
He says, maybe too calmly, “I think I’m going to need to hear that again.”  
  
It’s harder to say it the second time. God, you didn’t know that. You should probably know that.  
  
You don’t because you’ve never said it out loud with anyone besides the Losers, running hot on adrenaline and fear. 

Backstage hookups and one-night-stands were the backbone of your life because no one asked questions, no one cared, and everyone got what they came for.  
  
  
You’re starting to realize that maybe you’ve lost something a bit more devastating than memories.  
  
  
You say, “I want to come out.” 

Then: “On the special. I want to be a full rebrand. That’s what you wanted anyway, wasn’t it? No more bullshit. No more fake girlfriend with faker tits and shitty skits that haven’t been funny since the 90’s. Masturbators anonymous? What the fuck _was_ that?”  
  
  
And Steve, who has never once missed out on a chance to fuck with you, who you’ve begun to realize bares an incredible resemblance to a certain Jewish teenager who yelled _fuck_ in his bar mitzvah speech, says, “Well, that works out considering you haven’t been funny since the 90’s. So, what, you want to pull an Ellen?”  
  
  
It’s a shitty joke, but it pops the invisible bubble. It makes you laugh, face falling into your hands as you snort.  
  
  
“Fuck you man, Jesus. You’re one of the first people I say this shit to, and this is what I get? Gay rights my ass.”  
  
  
Steve doesn’t miss a beat, because that’s why you hired him: “Get what? The best manager in LA? Fuck yeah, Tozier. You should be so lucky.”  
  
  
Steve’s eyes soften and he reaches out, lays a hand over yours and squeezes lightly. You hadn’t realized you expected him to never touch you again until he shattered the expectation in front of you. Your throat feels dry.  
  
  
“Thanks for telling me, Rich. I’m really proud of you. And as for the special?” Steve glances at his phone and picks it up, swiping the screen open into an email. “Yeah, I think we can make your DeGeneres moment happen.”  
  
  
It’s then that it hits you, between Steve’s kind smile and the miles and miles separating you from the Losers, that you never once believed you’d actually get to have this.  
  
  
Nights of staring up at your ceiling and rotating between slideshows of hand brushes, of picturing your last name on a marriage license, _Mr. and Mr. Kaspbrak I now pronounce you_ — of praying that everything wrong inside you would just set itself the right way.  
  
  
“Oh,” you say, and you realize you’re smiling, which is infinitely better than crying because you’re still pretty close to it. You feel lightheaded, feel giddy and weightless for maybe the first time since the Chinese restaurant when your life slid back into place.  
  
  
You take an obvious breath and wait until Steve glances up from his phone, one eyebrow already raised.  
  
  
Your smile morphs into a grin, “Steve? I’m gay, by the way. Just so you know. Thought it might be a bit awkward to keep that one to myself after all this.”  
  
  
Steve looks at you for another beat before lifting a hand up to his mouth, laughter shaking out of him before you’re following right after, relief washing over you like a tidal wave.  
  
  


.

  
  


The last night you remember in Derry goes like this:

Eddie left the graduation ceremony early to have some special dinner with his mother and aunts that no one else was invited to. He’d moped about it the entire week before, and you’d tried to make it seem better, even if the thought of all those Mrs. K clones smothering Eddie made you feel sick in your own skin.

Eddie left after pictures and you never asked about the note. You gave Ben and Mike their graduation gifts early and at a quarter ‘til midnight, you drove your shitty car a block away from Eddie’s house and walked the rest of the way until you could see his window.

You had four rocks in your hand, ready to try for the perfect throw, when the window flew open and Eddie’s head peaked out. 

“Holy fuck,” you said at the same time Eddie said, “You can’t sneak around for shit. Get in here you moron.”

Which led you here: crawling through Eddie’s window the same way you had at ten and nearly every week since then.

When you finally make it in, you sit on the ledge, smirking and spread your arms wide, “C’mon, Eddie baby, you got any love to spare for an old high school sweetheart?”

It’s a bad joke. Too close to home and the question of if Eddie ever got his letter still burning you inside.

Eddie shocks the smirk right off your face when he leans in and hugs you tight.  
  
You let yourself breathe into it, eyes closed and still trying to press the moment down into something that can fit in your hands. In the pockets of your jeans.  
  
  
“I don’t know why you came here,” Eddie says, face burrowed in your shoulder, and you realize you are the one prolonging the hug now, but you don’t let him go. But he makes no move to push you away. “I still have my graduation party tomorrow, idiot.”  
  
  
He pulls back, staring at you with that same look you’ve never been good at deciphering. It’s somewhere between curious and fond and something else, but you don’t let yourself place it.  
  
  
Instead, you nod your head, plastering on a grin wide enough that you feel it wrinkle your eyes, “I know. I just wanted to drop by early. I couldn’t let Mrs. K steal all my thunder, so I thought I’d make it extra special, you know? A secret celebration.”  
  
  
Eddie’s face lights up. 

You know you’re both picturing the same film of memories. Because you’d had a lot of those when you were younger: “Secret Celebrations” for when Eddie’s mom locked him up just in time for birthday party season.

Sonia Kaspbrak hated sickness more than anything, and the two of you know that it’s all you’ve ever been. You were Eddie’s initial rebellion, continued down over a decade, and you have to stop thinking about it.

  
You remember sneaking in after dark with slices of cake and birthday hats from whoever’s party you’d skipped out early on. Bill would bitch at you when it was his, but Stan always made sure you never forgot to take an extra party favor, even if he never asked why you were leaving. 

When your birthday came around, you had two parties: one with the Losers outside of Mrs. K knowledge, usually the seven of you tucked into Ben’s small apartment where Mike and Stan had made you a cake, and one with just you and Eddie, comics under the covers a night later and maybe with icing cookies you’d pick up from the grocery with some birthday money.

  
It’s almost like that now, you can make yourself believe that. Or at least make Eddie believe that. Because it’s what you want this to be— Eddie’s celebratory steps towards freedom and not your own secret goodbye.  
  
  
Because if Stan were still here, he’d know what you were doing. He’d see the signs and maybe try to warn Eddie, to stop you from doing it.  
  
  
But Stan isn’t here. He hasn’t been for years and he might not ever be again. And you’re careful in lacing your words to the only other person who’s ever known you as well as you smile at him in the moonlight.  
  
  
When you pull out the wrapped gift from your backpack, Eddie’s eyebrows rise to his hairline, a light flush across his cheeks from the shadows of streetlights spilling through the window.  
  
Eddie says, “Richie...”  
  
  
Like he’s unsure. Or he’s waiting for something.  
  
  
You let your grin spread wider and push it forward, until the gift is pressing against both your chests. 

He hasn’t moved since the hug ended, you realize, your own face growing warm. He’s still close enough for you to see the tiny slope of freckles across his nose. The patch that would darken in the summer when he’d run across the quarry, jumping off the edge with nervous energy that made Derry bearable for a time.  
  
“C’mon, Eds. Don’t tell me you don’t know what a present is? Do you even know how to open one of these? It’s easy, same as how I open up your mom—“  
  
Eddie snaps, “Oh, fuck you,” righteous anger ripping the package from your hands and beginning to tear through it, all previous hesitance filed away.  
  
You try to keep your face calm, anything but obvious while he tears through the paper, finally opening the box.  
  
Eddie stares at it. “Oh.”  
  
“Yeah,” you say, shrugging, looking anywhere else in the room but him. “I just— well, I know how much you loved coming over and playing with my record player. And I had some extra cash saved up from that shitty pizza job over the summer? And you need some training for college ragers so—”  
  
“Richie,” Eddie says, and you stop talking, mouth slamming shut. Because Eddie’s looking at you, eyes wide and wondrous in a way that makes your chest warm and fidgety.  
  
“You got me a Walkman,” Eddie says, quiet. He traces the outline of the machine absentmindedly, still looking at you.  
  
You swallow, throat feeling incredibly dry. “Yeah, well. That’s part one anyway.”  
  
You turn around to dig through your backpack, Eddie whispering _part one?_ behind you as your fingers brush the tiny gift you’ve had buried in here for months. You close your eyes, take a breath, steeling yourself into a casual smile you don’t feel before turning back around, package offered in your outstretched hand.  
  
“For the kind gentleman,” you say, in your best British Voice. But either Eddie doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, because he doesn’t tell you to shut up. Instead, he reaches out and takes the small package from your hand gently.  
  
“There’s just one rule for this one,” you say, Eddie’s eyes lifting from the gift paper to meet yours.  
  
You cough, looking away. Suddenly everything about the moment is too soft, too revealing. The moonlight painted across Eddie’s starry eyed expression makes your stomach twist and it makes you—  
  
“Rule?” Eddie echoes.  
  
“Uh, just—“ you scramble a bit, moving your hand in a nonsensical motion. “Just don’t use this part until after you leave, okay?”  
  
Eddie’s eyebrows furrow, but there’s no snide comment and it’s starting to make you nervous. He peels back the paper silently, until all he’s left with is a sleek new cassette tape balanced in his palm.  
  
“There’s a track list tapped to the back,” you say quickly. Because suddenly the moment feels too close to it, too vulnerable with the way Eddie’s staring at the tape like he doesn’t know what to make of it. “There’s only one on there about Mrs. K, but what can I say? The woman can’t get enough of me.”  
  
Eddie doesn’t say anything, which makes your stomach feel like lead.  
  
“Eds?”  
  
Eddie blinks. Once. Twice. Before he shakes his head, eyes looking up to meet yours. This time, you're selfish enough to let them stay.  
  
Eddie says, soft, “Richie, you know I...”  
  
But he doesn’t finish, still looking between you and the tape like he’s trying to place something he can’t get right.  
  
You swallow the lump in your throat.  
  
“I—,” Eddie starts, again, faltering. “I love it, Rich. Thank you. It’s—“  
  
“Charming?” You quip, grin smoothing into a smirk, because this is the part you know, the part you’ve played so long it might just be yourself. “Dazzling? C’mon, Eddie baby, lay it on—“  
  
“It’s perfect, asshole,” Eddie cuts you off, a small smile on his face. “It’s—wow, Rich. Thank you.”

  
Your chest cracks open. You think, _oh._ And then nothing at all because Eddie’s rushing you, crashing into your chest with another hug, his face pressed into your neck.  
  
“Thanks, Trashmouth,” Eddie mumbles, and you try to suppress a shiver. “I really love it.”  
  
You close your eyes, pulling him as close as you can get away with, burying your nose in his hair. “Happy graduation, Eddie.”  
  
When he pulls back, he keeps his forehead tilted against yours, arms hooked around your neck and still smiling, warm and bright in a way you haven’t seen so long that suddenly you ache with it.  
  
“Not to upstage you or anything,” he says, “but you’re really gonna fucking love your gift. So you better show up early tomorrow, okay?”  
  
You keep your smile frozen on your face, “Wouldn't miss it for the world, Eds.”  
  
He wrinkles his nose, the moment breaking in a way that has your shoulders falling. “Don’t call me Eds, dude. Jesus.”  
  
You snort until it blows into full on laughter, arms still wrapped around Eddie until he’s following suit and you’re both on the ground, legs tangled and hands pressed together. 

The two of you sit on the ground, legs still tangled together and trying to think of the worst middle school memory you can, bullshitting in a way that’s warm. Familiar in a way you don’t know how to keep.  
  
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, after a while and starting to yawn, sleep softening his face. It breaks your heart.

He leans on the window seal, one eyebrow raised and unimpressed as you pretend to fall out, but still watching you crawl back outside the frame. You let your hand linger a second longer, two, before you pull away. Your body feels cold without contact.  
  
“Can do, Spaghetti. You’re gonna kill it in New York, you know that? Those little city bitches won’t know what hit them.”  
  
Eddie snorts, but he looks fond, eyes only on you the way you’ve worked eighteen years to earn. “‘City bitches?’ And fuck, dude. Don’t make me think about it yet. I still have one more day.”  
  
“One more day,” you echo, settling the thought. “But I mean it, Eds, okay? New York isn’t going to know how it ever survived without you in it. And we’ll call, right? Every day. I’ll bother the shit out of you until you pick up.”

“I don’t think I need to worry about picking up for you to bother me,” Eddie deadpans, but he’s grinning, if a little confused at your sudden conversation change. “And of course we’ll call, dick. You have to let me know how California is. Maybe I’ll come visit over a long weekend.”

And the thing is, you both know, to some extent, that this is it. After tomorrow, there won’t be any more _RichieandEddie_ bullshitting sessions or comic fights. You won’t hear Eddie laugh in the loud way that makes your chest ache. 

Eddie knows it because of Bev and Bill and Stan.

The divisive factor is this: you already have this grief because now you’re losing Eddie to it too. You know what you’re losing as you lose it. 

So you say, “Yeah. Just check for a sock first.”  
  
And Eddie says, “You’re fucking _disgusting,_ man.”

Because you’re both playing the parts you’d written when you were six, that you renewed at twelve that led you into the people you are now.

Eddie says, “Okay. Get out of here, Trashmouth. We have a party tomorrow. You better not show up late.”  
  
You smile, softer than you’d usually allow, and say, “Goodnight, Eds.”  
  
Because here’s a component of your first rule, again, the one you’ve always known:   
  
You’re good at running away, climbing right back out the window you’d spent so many summers jumping through, watching Eddie’s smiling face, his wave until he’s just another shadow.

You wonder if you are ever going to get this again. If you’ll see Eddie again. If any of it will ever be the same.  
  


By the time Eddie’s graduation party has started, you’re two states away and already forgetting you’d ever had a group of people who loved you enough to make the world bearable. 

  
  


.

  
  


Eddie has called you three times in the two months you’ve been back in LA. 

Bill is somewhere around five, Mike seven, and Bev’s in the high double digits.

This is important because the fourth comes while you are in a meeting with some producers Steve has deemed ‘mid-level importance’ when your phone buzzes. It’s Eddie’s scowling face that interrupts your game of candy crush. 

You’re excusing yourself and answering on the second ring, walking into the hallway with what you hope is a smooth posh Voice, saying, “Tozier residence, may I please ask who’s speaking?”

“Wow,” Eddie’s voice cracks down the line, fuzzy with static but still solid enough to warm you to your toes. “Your impressions have somehow gotten worse. Congratulations, asshole, you suck.”

“Yeah, your _mom’s_ asshole—“

“My mother’s fucking _dead, Richie_. You dick. I—,”

You can’t help it. You break, laughing. 

“Alright, well run your critique by me again when you’re selling out venues. Then we’ll see who the real winner is.”

“Last I heard you weren’t selling out anything,” Eddie sighs. “I think the real winner is anyone who didn’t have to make this phone call.”

“You really know how to treat a girl right, Eds.”

“Fuck off, asshole,” Eddie says, but it’s distracted, falling flat while something else tries to peak up around it. “That isn’t— are you even going to ask why I’m calling?”

“I have a pretty good feeling you’re about to tell me, dude. Or are we playing twenty questions? Because I only play that with my tits out. Strip poker rules exclusively.”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie says, but he’s laughing. You can hear it bubbling out across the line and it makes you feel warm, even more aware of your face and the crowd in the main area you’ve walked into. You walk a little further and find a small corridor next to a vending machine, falling into the chair there.

Eddie says, “You’re a mess.”

“Give it to me straight, doc,” you continue, still too aware of your own smile. “Am I gonna survive this phone call?”

Eddie mumbles something.

“What?”

“I _said_ ,” Eddie starts, sounding pissier than he had a moment ago, more agitated. “I’m staying with Ben and Bev right now.”

A pause. Then—

“Okay,” you try, something unsaid still not breaching the surface. So you fill the silence the way you do when you’re unsure: with white static vocalized panic.

“What—what is that supposed to mean to me? Do you want a fruit basket? Because I think that’s kind of homophobic for you to ask that of me, Eddie. That’s fucked up.”

“ _Homoph—_ How the fuck is that on me? You make a dumbass assumption and that’s my fault? Can you take anything seriously? Anything at all?”

You say, “I’m going to be honest, Eds. I really do not know what you are wanting from me right now.”

“How about this dickwad: I’m getting divorced.”

Silence.

The world doesn’t slow down. Rather, it speeds up. Everything shifts into hyperfocus. The M&M package across from you starts to blur before you realize it’s just your reflection in the glass and it’s you that’s shaking.

There are a thousand things you want to say. Questions you want to ask already lining up so quickly it feels like they’re going to spill out onto the floor. Or maybe you’re just about to be sick.

Instead, you say, “Oh.” 

“‘ _Oh_ ’,” Eddie echoes, already on the defense. 

It’s as if you’d repeated yourself from the restaurant, saying the first mean thing that popped into your mind when he’d first shown you all her pictures. It hadn’t even mattered what she’d looked like, really, just that she was there when you never got to be.

“What? No jokes? Nothing about how I’m such a mommy’s boy I went ahead and married her?”

“Well,” you say, still too quiet. “You made the motherfucker joke back at the Townhouse. I know better than to try to follow-up that act.”

Eddie laughs, but it’s twisted. Unkind and mean in a way that stings. “Why did I call you? Why did I think this was a good idea? I should have fucking known. I listened to Ben. Bev told me it’d be—”

“I’m sorry,” you blurt, too quick, the words are spilling out like a flood, but at least you aren’t retching this time. “I’m sorry, Eds. I don’t know if this is good news or bad news. But either way I’m sorry it’s happening to you.”

You want to add, _I’m sorry I wasn’t there to stop any of it._ But you know a line when you see one. Because you wrote those rules yourself, didn’t you? 

At eleven and watching Sonia pull Eddie away from you any time she’d catch him being brave.

At thirteen with the town’s eyes on your every move and the way she’d started filling Eddie’s head with lies about HIV and AIDS anytime he was within earshot. All the times she’d call you _one of those dirty boys_ , _Eddie-bear_ , and Eddie had rolled his eyes, called it overprotection, but you saw her eyes. Saw that she _knew,_ and fuck if that didn’t freeze you down to your bones.

The past is still lingering in the present. Repeating like a sick twist.

You aren’t an idiot. You all saw Bev’s bruises at the restaurant, and you’d all known her dad was a piece of shit back then the same way you knew Eddie’s mom was on the same level. 

But you were still kids. You couldn’t do anything but hide in a clubhouse built to keep out the rest of the world for even a little bit. Not in a town that didn’t give a shit, that functioned on apathy and where child murder was a consistent presence.

None of you had even needed the clown to be a monster in the closet when so many of them were walking around in your own homes, smiling in the daylight.

Twenty-seven years later and you still couldn’t do anything about it, could you? 

You’d all learned how to be brave that summer, but the clown took that away with your memories and left you all scattered in the water, torn away and searching for any signs of the familiar.

You’d seen the calls lighting up his phone at the restaurant. The way Eddie’s voice went soft and complacent in a way that made you shiver, made you remember calling his landline as a kid: _Can Eddie please come out and play, Mrs. K?_

If anyone in Derry knew Sonia Kaspbrak outside of her son, it was you. And it didn’t take a genius to piece together the insistent contact, the lowered voices and commanding presence with the pill bottles. It was glaring enough that you’d kept yourself up in a cold sweat a week after flying back to LA, wondering if the new Mrs. K had used sugar pills too. Or if she’d upgraded Eddie in some unknowable, irretrievable way.

“I’m sorry,” you say, again. Pulling yourself back into the present before you drown. “I’m not good with the real life stuff, Eddie. You know that. But I am sorry that you have to be.”

Twenty-seven years. How had the time felt too long and too short all at once? How could you answer the phone for your best friend in middle school and pick right back up like everything was still the same. Different, but still the same in all the ways that mattered.

“Thanks,” Eddie says, voice muffled but less angry and manic. “And yeah, it’s. It’s a good thing, I think. That’s what Bev tells me anyway.”

“She’s usually right,” you say. “So I’d trust her on this one.”

“Yeah. Yeah, she’s helped. A lot. Especially about what it would mean to go back, and it’s just...I mean, you have to understand, Richie. Alright?”

Eddie stops, breathing down the line, shuffling like he’s looking for his inhaler. 

There’s no clock in the room. You have no idea how long you’ve been gone. 

“She isn’t a bad person,” he settles on, voice barely shaking in a way that you know, even after all of these years, means he’s trying to be heard. And you’ve never been one to deny him that.

“We just weren’t good for each other, okay? And I know, okay. _I_ _know_ everyone is talking about it. We saw how Bev ended up with the ghost of her dad, and you all think I tried to fuck my mom’s shadow. But it’s— it’s not, okay? It’s—”

“Eds,” you cut in, deliberate but soft. You can hear the wheeze in his breathing. And god, you hate it. You hate the people who put it there.

“You don’t owe me anything, man. Not any of us. Okay? And we don’t think that shit about you or Bev. I’m just— here. Whenever you need me. No questions asked.”

Now it’s Eddie who keeps quiet.

“Bev was right,” Eddie says, after a moment, when the silence between you both has faded into a calm balance. “About calling you. It did make me feel better. Even though I think she was probably meaning that you’d make me laugh or something.”

You don’t smile.

You’re still too angry, too scrubbed raw in a way you haven’t felt in decades, but it’s a close thing with the warmth settling in your chest. “Shit, Spaghetti. Did you just admit you think I’m funny?”

“Eat a dick,” Eddie says.

By the time some poor intern from the meeting walks in to find you, you’re bent over yourself, still wheezing with laughter from where Eddie’s hung up.

  
  


.

  
  


Whenever someone says Los Angeles, people think _Hollywood dazzle_. They think of making it big, body shots off of blonde women on the wrong side of twenty-five, and sleep-less nights of wading through call-back logs. 

They don’t know what it actually means to crawl your way through. 

_Not even to the top_ , you think, racing as fast as your legs can carry you back to the station. _It’s more like a subway car of brushing elbows, trying to get the last bagel. Or a crumb of a bagel. Or enough space for your elbow to make it on the train._

Reality, of course, is much more bland.

Because right now there are two trays of various coffee orders in your hands and a thousand prayers mumbled under your breath as you take the last corner back to the station. 

Which of course means you run directly into someone on the other side. 

It’s slow motion. A bad relay reel. It’s watching the past five years of your life’s work tumble out of your hands in the form of four double shot decaf vanilla lattes with extra foam, directly onto one of the nicest suits you’ve ever seen. 

It would be hilarious, is the thing, if it were anyone else. You’d be laughing your ass off across the street, loud enough where you wouldn’t care if they heard you. 

But it isn’t funny now because instead it’s happening to _you_ , twenty-five and working three underpaid jobs with a part-time internship at a radio station you’re still hoping leads to somewhere. 

This is all to say that the expression on Best Suit’s face when the lukewarm drinks make impact is priceless. The thing of comedy specials. SNL would be lucky to have you right now. 

And what you should say is obvious, right? 

You’re mortified, but you’re still a person. You’re so broke you had to use dish soap on your laundry last week, but you’re managing. 

You’re on the brink of breaking into _something_ and you can feel it in that same way you’ve never had a name for it. 

You think of what to say. Something like: _I’m so so sorry. Are you alright?_

Or _: Here, let me get these dry cleaned for you and wipe out next month’s food budget! I’m also definitely about to get fired from my unpaid internship and possibly only shot at getting to tell jokes the way I just know they need to be told._

Instead, you blurt, “There’s no fucking way I can pay for that.”

There’s at least twenty dollars worth of milk and foam and cherry roasted specialty bullshit LA espresso dripping from the sleeves and front of Best Suit’s suit, and you wish the ground would swallow you. 

The man blinks at you. Once. Twice. Before he starts _laughing,_ hard enough that he’s bent over with hands on his knees. 

“Holy shit,” you say, concerned. “Did I break you? I’m already in so much fucking trouble please don’t try to crazy murder me for this. I’m about to get fired so hard and loud, I’ll become the office’s newest ghost story. And not even the funny way I was planning on going out with. I was going to put walkie-talkies in the air vent and anchovies in Devan’s car engine because that motherfucker _knew_ what a goddamn pain that Oscar assignment was going to be and he still—”

The man is wheezing while you babble, saying nothing as you wave your free hand, pen tray of coffee still preserved as you hold it close to your chest. 

“What’s your name?” Best Suit asks 

“Uh,” you say eloquently. “Richie Tozier. Please don’t sue me. The lint on your shoe is worth more than my life right now. It’s really not worth it.”

The man pulls out something shiny and hands it to you. 

“Call me for an interview sometime,” the guy says, wiping away tears. “I think you could have something here kid.”

You watch him walk away, ruined suit and all. When he crosses the street, you turn the paper over and realize it’s a card. 

_Steve Simmons, talent agent._

Over a decade later, there’s still no other way to tell this story. 

  
  
  


.

You’re forty. Almost forty-one, even. 

It’s fucked. It’s fantastic actually, in a surreal way, that you made it this far, even if you were catatonic for over half of it. You really thought you’d be dead by now. 

At thirteen you couldn't see past that summer and the clown and Bower’s saying what a _sissy little bitch_ you were, and at twenty-three with half your life erased, you thought about taking the other half out of it to save yourself some time.

So, you’re forty now. You’re an adult. You live on your own. You have a moderately successful career, you have night terrors, and you’re gay. 

These are the facts, the little components that add up into you, even if you try to twist them around into something else. You’re working on it.

So is Bev, which of course makes her the one who can read you best when you’re still buffering. Therefore the one to propose a party for your forty-first. 

It’s Losers videochat time, coordinated with Mike’s travel plans and Ben and Bev’s time zone. Eddie’s got his own place now, out in Chicago and only about twenty minutes from Ben’s.

You are sitting on the couch, trying not to let the softness in your chest show on your face as Eddie yells at Bill about computer viruses when Bev cuts in, already grinning in a way that has you on edge. 

“Forty-one, Rich. Wow. Don’t tell me you’ve already got some big plans.”

Your mouth, as always, moves without you thinking about it: “Big plans? Oh baby, you already know everything about me is big. Just ask Eddie’s mom. She’s still recovering.”

Eddie hisses a sharp _fuck you_ , _dickwad! She’s dead_ that makes you laugh. 

Mike sighs, but Bev’s smirking a little with Ben’s head on her shoulder, “It’s the first birthday we’ll have together in over a decade, you bitch. We’re celebrating.”

No one says how it wasn’t by choice, or how only now it’s an _actual_ choice with two Losers’ controlling partners out of the way.

Mike adds something you don’t catch because you’re still trying to put the pieces together that stopped clicking after she said _forty-one_. 

You blink, take a second before it hits you.

_Oh_ , you think. 

You’d completely forgotten your birthday was coming up. 

Stan’s birthday was always the countdown you used to mark it. Your parents weren’t big on birthdays because they weren’t big on you, so you didn’t count the day outside the Loser’s calendar.

It was a month out from yours, you remember. It became a countdown between February and March for which Losers could get the better gift for who, but Ben always won. You don’t know why the rest of you even tried.

Losing the Losers meant losing your source of counting and celebration so, really, you don’t do birthdays. 

You did birthday benders, once upon a time in your late twenties. Three days spent out of your mind on some splurge coke and any men who didn’t mind fucking a dude too out of his mind to think about it. 

Fucked up, yeah. You know. You’re over it. Probably.

The chat’s gone onto one of Mike’s travel tangents, so luckily there isn't much to cover yourself for when everyone agrees on a date and you nod along, assuring them that _no, I don’t have any new tour dates plan and yes, I’m still writing like I promised, Big Bill, get off my dick and try writing an ending all that clown trauma can be proud of._

And if Eddie’s looking at you a little too knowing in the corner screen, eyebrows pinched up in the way you know means he’s seen something you wish he hadn’t, you don’t say a word.

You smile and you laugh and when Ben says something about him and Bev _coming in_ for the celebration, you're letting the words slip like oil, “Woah, dude. Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I’m gonna let you go _that_ far. Buy a guy dinner first, Jesus. Bev, you let him talk to you like that? Fuck.”

The joke gets a three groan chorus from Bill, Mike, and a blushing Ben, but Bev laughs so hard she snorts into the camera, and it almost makes up for the fact Eddie hasn’t said anything at all.

  
  


.

  
  


Thirty-one was your longest year because you spent half of it thinking of how to stop the number from getting any higher.

At twenty-six, Steve got you your first every single stage gig. And at twenty-nine, someone else was writing all the material you delivered to packed theatres. 

Afterwards, Steve said, _you’re funny, man. It could be all you. We could get assistants instead of writers, if it’s what you want._

And, it was almost gold-tier funny, because it’d been a little too close to what you’d wanted. You, who has never known what to do with a good thing once you have it. It didn’t help that the conversation was the first one you’d both spoken since Steve walked into your apartment as your latest hookup had just slipped out the door, leaving behind a shirt that was two sizes too small for you.

Steve said, _the show could be more you, dude. Whatever you want, Rich._ But what you’d heard, panic crazed and mind burning from how much he had really seen, was: _I know what you are and everyone else does too._

So you’d said, _originality is bullshit._ Hung up the call and accepted the first invitation you got to get high out of your mind in some stranger’s living room until your puke came up red.

Steve didn’t say anything else. The next day, when you were awake enough to process the sun shining through your curtains, you got an email confirming the renewed ghost writer contract.

And that was that. So here you are at thirty-one, still kicking and with a thinning hairline to boot as you prepare to go down on some blond twink who hasn’t laughed at one of your jokes.

The guy says, “How do you want to do this?”

And you know the role— this is the part where you smile. Where you say what they want to hear, whatever will get you off and out faster, before your hands start shaking.

Instead, you say, “It’s my birthday.” And immediately you regret it. 

The stranger doesn’t look like he knows what to do with that information. Then his head falls to the side and a small grin follows.

“Okay, birthday boy. Let’s get you something special.”

Everything after is starlight—porcelain and white powder and glaring until it’s nothing. And more nothing. And more. And green and crying and falling in and out, laughter echoing against the walls of wherever you’ve ended up.

Steve becomes a great contrast to all of it when you blink awake in your apartment. 

He’s red and pale all at once, saying, “That’s it. That’s fucking _it_ , Richie. Do you hear me? Quit, or I’m walking, Rich. That’s the deal. Clean up, or I’m leaving and I’ll take everyone with me.”

You don’t say a fucking word. And then it’s your turn to pick-up the phone.

When Steve tells you the details on the way to rehab, you aren’t surprised to learn how long you were out, but you are surprised that he even came looking. But you’re smart enough to keep quiet until you’re dropped off, checked-in, and being placed into some kind of fucking sharing circle.

When the group turns to you for an introduction, you smile wide enough it aches.

“Hey,” you say. “I’m Richie Tozier. I’m a Pisces, coke addict, and I’m here because my manager found me nearly overdosed in my bathroom on my birthday. I don’t remember putting ‘tears from an angry little man’ on my wish-list, but I’ve also been told that’s a side-effect of drug addiction.”

No one moves.

“Well,” you say, smile a little more cruel. “Who’s next?”

.

  
  


The plan goes like this: Bev and Ben catch an early flight on the day before your birthday to celebrate with you, Eddie tagging along on the coattails of his pending divorce. 

You called it a strategic fleeing. Bev had solemnly nodded along with you in solidarity but you were the only one Eddie flipped off.  
  


Ben has a meeting the next day that you’ve assured him at least a hundred times he doesn’t have to reschedule. That yes, you’re excited to see them all and no, you don’t secretly resent that the supposed Losers reunion for your birthday has devolved into shambles.

Bill and Audra are out of the country for filming, Mike tagging along with them both in a recent development everyone has noticed but yet to comment on. Though you both text often, you don’t know Patty well-enough to invite her to hang-out with her late husband’s middle school friends. And you don’t have anyone from your comedy circle you’re ready to have over anytime soon.

It’ll be a small celebration. Secretly, you’re glad for it. Maybe that makes you a monster or maybe just someone with crazy anxiety and quickly running out of the Wellbutrin needed to manage it, but either way it’s nice to still see some of your friends without the pressure. 

As promised, Eddie joins the meet-up on the coattails of Bev and Ben’s flight and you all grab dinner, something casual before heading back to your place for drinks and games. 

And it’s nice, you think, grabbing snacks from the kitchen and taking a break from the games, watching Bev scream guesses— _am I a human? Do I have fur? Am I ugly? Ben, Ben, am I fucking Dumbo? I hate that movie! Eddie, you little bitch stop laughing_ —about the Micky Mouse card on her forehead while Ben and Eddie match her volume, assuring her that no, she isn't ugly (Ben) and she needs to get a lot fucking better pretty quick if she wants to try at winning (Eddie).

It’s nice to have friends again. The people you grew up with, who love you like extensions of themselves the same way you love them.

Because it’s hard to merge Current Richie as you know yourself now with the memories that shaped you into who you are. You still feel like you spend too much being something else, someone else, outside of the Richie who grew up in Derry and the Richie practicing backstage before he answered Mike Halon’s phone call.

Will it always hurt so badly, you wonder, to be someone else? To be something other than the person you thought you were at eleven, at thirteen and forty.

You don’t know. You really wish you did.

It’s five more rounds before Ben passes out, wine-sleepy and sweet, on your couch, hand slipped into Bev’s. She meets your eyes with an over exaggerated wink as she makes a space on the carpet to curl up on. 

You’d offered guest rooms five times and been ignored every time, so you all had carried pillows and blankets into the living room, spreading them out like the sleepover forts you all used to make that summer. 

You’re lifting a blanket over a sleeping Bev when you hear a quiet, “You okay, Rich?”  
  
  
You turn around to find Eddie, arms crossed and leaning against your kitchen counter. 

It’s a good thing, you think, that you had kept all of your phone calls (mostly) non-visual before your birthday. You don’t think you could have handled it otherwise.

Eddie looks at you like he sees you, lips curling down when you don’t say anything, and you want to make a joke to break the warm thing building up your throat. 

You’re wine drunk and loved and having the best sober birthday you’ve had since you were a kid. And you want to tell him how no one’s done that for you in almost thirty years. That no one has wanted to look close enough, has known what that would mean, but the words don’t come out right.

You crack a grin that feels wobbly on your face, say, “The fucking clown, man.” Reverting back to your first response at the restaurant all those months ago because that’s safe and that’s expected. 

And you don’t say what you really think, that you’re about to break open in front of him and you don’t know what will spill out. That you’re afraid of what he’ll see, yes, but you’re more afraid of not being able to take any of it back.

Eddie nods like he gets it anyway, nearly proving something about the _psychic connection_ Bev had theorized, uncrosses his arms with a small smile as he moves to stand beside you.

He smells clean and like home, and he leans against your shoulder as you both watch the clock turn its hand one more beat before it’s your birthday. 

It’s 12:01 on the morning of your forty-first birthday, and Eddie lays his head on your shoulder with a soft smile you can feel against your shirt, saying, “Happy Birthday, Rich. Fuck that fucking clown.”

.

**Author's Note:**

> “We saw something once. And then it was over.  
> Time started up again as if it had never stopped.  
> We saw someone, and it was a soul.  
> and that soul was us, or I, or everyone.  
> We felt we had been waiting only after it had occurred.  
> And once it had happened we were homesick for before  
> and after—both. Then we stirred. We found we could move  
> what would have been our limbs.
> 
> \- Marie Howe, "Limbo"
> 
> me, finding this fic in my drafts with like 4 months worth of 'editing' & revision notes: im not getting paid for this. im posting it.
> 
> i do not write fiction. So is this good? probably not, beloved. But I hope you enjoyed some of it <3
> 
> title is from Louise Glück "Aubade." Follow my tumblr @rhymaes if you want to see me talk to myself abt poetry & a canon gay angel's homophobic religious trauma <3


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